Contrary to what most people think, there is enough food for everyone, according to the World Food Program. Unfortunately, one-third of all food is just wasted, said a study done by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
In the Philippines, for instance, we throw away 3.29 kilograms per year of food that could still be eaten. This was the finding of the Food and Nutrition Research Institute, a line agency of the Department of Science and Technology.
In 2008 alone, the country wasted some 196,869 metric tons of rice. That total accounted for 12.2% of that year’s rice imports. The loss amounted to a whooping P7.3 billion. “With the same amount, more than 2 million Filipinos could have been fed,” someone commented.
Now comes a thought-provoking report from the Inter Press Service (IPS). It stated: “Believe it or not, the way to eradicate hunger from the face of the Earth is as feasible as it is handy. In fact, the current loss and waste of one-third of all food produced for human consumption would be just enough to feed the nearly one billion people who go to bed hunger every single night.”
As much as 1.3 billion tons per year of food is lost or wasted throughout the supply chain – from initial agricultural production down to final household consumption. And it is not just about losing or wasting food; it also implies a waste of resources used in production such as land, water, energy and inputs.
“Up to one third of all food is spoiled or squandered before it is consumed by people,” the FAO pointed out in a new report. “It is an excess in an age where almost a billion people go hungry.”
According to FAO, food losses and waste amounts to roughly US$680 billion in industrialized countries and US$310 billion in developing countries. “Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food – respectively 670 and 630 million tons,” it said.
Global quantitative food losses and waste per year are roughly 30% for cereals, 40-50% for root crops, fruits and vegetables, 20% for oil seeds, meat and dairy plus 35% for fish, the FAO report said.
“Even if just one-fourth of the food currently being lost or wasted globally could be saved, it would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people in the world,” the report pointed out.
FAO defines food loss as “the decrease in quantity or quality of food.” Food waste, a component of food loss, is “any removal of food from the food supply chain which is or was at some point fit for human consumption, or which has spoiled or expired.”
According to FAO, food waste and losses in developing countries occur mainly at early stages of the food value chain and can be traced back to financial, managerial and technical constraints in harvesting techniques as well as storage and cooling facilities.
In the Philippines, the lack of modern agricultural technologies, resources and skills, infrastructure like irrigation systems and farm-to-market roads, land tenure, support for research, innovation and agricultural workers have been found as contributing factors to food loss.
Where do those food waste go? In most cases, they are dumped in a landfill causing odor as it decomposes and has the potential to add biological oxygen demand to the leachate. This must be the reason why those organic waste from New York restaurants are banned from landfills since 2015.
In industrialized countries like United Kingdom and the United States, food scraps constitute around 19% of the waste dumped in landfills, where it ends up rotting and producing methane, a greenhouse gas.
Methane is the second most prevalent greenhouse gas that is released into the air – after carbon dioxide. Although methane spends less time in the atmosphere (12 years) than carbon dioxide, it’s more efficient at trapping radiation, according to some studies.
“Methane is 25 times greater to impact climate change than carbon dioxide in a 100-year period,” a study said.
For the information of the uninformed, methane gas is created naturally as a waste product of anaerobic bacteria (those living with little or no oxygen). The digestive system of animals such as cattle, goats and sheep also contain these bacterial and produce methane gas. A single cow belches out 100 gallons of methane gas a day.
However, humans accounts over 60% of methane emissions globally.
A previous study, done in 2015 in Italy, found out that food waste from “farm to fork” emits nearly 4 million tons of carbon dioxide.
In the Philippines, some food waste in the restaurants are being collected by people and these are fed to swine. This has been practiced in not-so-urbanized cities and small towns.
In small households, food waste can be biodegraded by composting and reused to fertilize soil. “By redistributing nutrients and high microbial populations, compost reduces water runoff and soil erosion by enhancing rainfall penetration, which has been shown to reduce the loss of sediment, nutrients and pesticide losses to streams by 75-95%,” Wikipedia reported.
Another way of recycling food waste is through vermicomposting. The food scraps can be feed to worms who produce a byproduct called vermicast, which can be used as fertilizer for crops, ornamentals and even fish raised in ponds.
