Friends,
It is extraordinary how long it has taken for institutions concerned with food policies and food management to wake up to the scale of the food loss/food waste problem. At last we have some apparently quite reliable figures on food waste, and these are startling. The idea that food waste in developed countries is more or less at the same level as the total net food production in all of Africa can only shock. Hopefully it will spur efforts to tackle the problem.
This same blindness to reality is also behind the widespread popular perception that almost 1 billion people face chronic hunger because there is not enough food available for everyone to eat well. The big stress on food supplies, however, comes from the increasing per caput consumption of food, at levels beyond what is required for a healthy life, by a rising proportion of the world’s population as their incomes rise. The tip of the iceberg is represented by the 1.5 billion people who are overweight or obese, but I suspect that a careful analysis would show that a large proportion of the 60% incremental food demand forecast by FAO for 2050 (when population may have grown by about 30%) will be the result of general over-eating by existing and ‘new’ middle income families whose members do not necessarily reach high BMI scores. When I looked at how much extra food would be required to raise 1 billion hungry people above the hunger threshold (in energy terms) it would amount to less than 2% of current global food production!
So the problem of food waste is not so much that it is robbing the hungry of extra food, except to the extent that it may raise food prices: most of them are hungry because they simply cannot afford to buy the food their families need. The long term solution is for governments to adopt economic and fiscal policies that share the benefits of growth much more equitably especially through stimulating productive employment. But, until they do this, the best investment that they can make is in targeted social protection programmes that enable all their citizens to eat adequately. Not only will this respect their right to access to adequate food but it will generate a huge economic dividend, resulting from greater individual productivity, better health and greater longevity.
The background note correctly reflects on the efficiency gains that would accrue to the food system from cutting food and food-related waste. I hope when the full study gets under way, however, that it will give particular attention to identifying/quantifying the environmental as well as health implications of food waste and overconsumption because these probably provide the strongest justification for public expenditure and actions to reduce waste. The extra food that is produced simply to be discarded is probably – but this needs to be carefully checked – putting more pressure on forests, soils and water supplies than the current production of biofuels which has captured so much public attention. Equally seriously, when food is produced, transported, processed, packaged, distributed, cooked and then thrown away it has a double impact on the processes of climate change – first through the fossil fuels used in the production to table process, and then through its decomposition, resulting in incremental methane production in landfills.
One of the major constraints to changing policies with the aim of reducing waste, especially waste occurring at the later stage of the food chain, is that very large numbers of people earn their living – or part of it – from creating the surpluses that end up being discarded at various points in the system. Beyond that, in many developed countries, a burgeoning fitness industry is developing to burn off the fat resulting from a combination of increasingly sedentary life styles and over-consumption of food!
The background note briefly touches on the issue of food pricing policies, and this seems to be crucial. Intuitively, it would seem that a substantial rise in retail food prices would have the effect of moving consumer behaviour away from wastage and over-consumption. This could be induced by punitive taxation on high footprint foods, but would have to be linked to simultaneous measures that would compensate for any incomes lost in the food chain, especially by small-scale farmers. This could take the form of subsidies designed to hasten the processes of transition to more sustainable food production systems. It would also be vital to match any measures that increase food prices with compensatory growth in social protection to safeguard adequate food consumption by low-income families.
Elsewhere (see How to End Hunger in Times of Crises (2nd edition), just published by FastPrint Publishing), Ignacio Trueba and I have put forward the idea of creating a voluntary Global Mechanism to Cut Food Waste and Over-Consumption. This would require the governments of countries in which food waste is a problem to set self-imposed goals for reduction in average per caput food consumption/waste and, to the extent that they fail to meet them, to buy entitlements to over-consume from countries with a high incidence of hunger. It would be based on similar principles to those on which the Clean Development Mechanism is founded, which allows for the purchase of entitlements to exceed emissions targets. When we first proposed this in 2011, we suggested that the CFS examine this idea: it now seems appropriate to reiterate this proposal!
Andrew MacMillan
Andrew MacMillan