Re HLPE’s Dec 13 zero draft review of food losses/waste:
Diarrhoea is also a food loss/waste issue
There is a conceptual food-chain issue that needs addressing if we are to include nutritional aspects of food security in this overview and debate: food losses through diarrhoeas.
Per capita food availability has long been a basic datum when calculating nutritional sufficiency of macro level supply. Unfortunately availability is only the start of the nutritional food chain. Food quality, health status, and quality of drinking water and the sanitary environment all play critical roles in determining how far the food ‘available’ , prepared and consumed is actually made use of by the body, or, as in the case of episodes of diarrhoea in which food is excreted before the intestine has had time to extract nutrients from the mass of food presented in the gut, fails to be utilised. Food loss due to diarrhoea can amount to 100% in rapid-transit cases during cholera presenting with violent vomiting and diarrhoea. In communities where children in particular are prone to one or more bouts of mild to moderate diarrhoea per fortnight (the usual question posed in surveys) the children’s personal food security could be compromised by 15 % or more over time.
Understanding this link between food security and gastro-intestinal health should prompt consideration in a food-loss/waste reduction strategy of advocacy for, if not actual collaboration with, increased activity in the domestic water and sanitation sector. This could raise the potential for retention of ‘available’ food in the body long enough for maximum nutritional extraction.
WHO suggests there are 1.7 billion cases of diarrhoea every year (2013), mainly in young children and of those mainly during or after weaning. Figures on food losses are scarce. A notional calculation suggests that even at only 3 days of 10% of energy losses in under-five diets of 1500Kc this amounts to a total annual energy loss/waste equivalent to 225,000,000 MT of grain worldwide. Given that the caseload includes adults, persistent diarrhoeas due to disease, and vomiting as well as diarrhoeas in cholera cases , the actual total waste will be larger than this.
Other readers, who are not buried in rural France for the holidays and have better access to data than I have currently, are encouraged to contribute here their own or any data on food losses during diarrhoeas, in order to complement the WHO references below and build the case for recognition of and collaboration over diarrhoea reduction for increased food security.
References:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs330/en/, accessed 26.12.2013
WHO, April 2013, Diarrhoeal Disease, Factsheet 330
Judith Appleton