'1.3 billion tons of annual food waste causing harm to natural resources'

The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) report.
'Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources' is the first study to analyse the impacts of global food wastage from an environmental perspective, looking specifically at its consequences for the climate, water and land use, and biodiversity. Among its key findings, the reports says each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water three times larger than the annual flow of Russia's Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere.
"In addition to its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of US $750 billion annually," the report estimates. According to it, 54 percent of the world's food wastage occurs 'upstream' during production, post-harvest handling and storage. Forty-six percent of it happens 'downstream', at the processing, distribution and consumption stages. As a general trend, developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher in middle - and high - income regions, where it accounts for 31-39 percent of total wastage, than in low-income regions (4-16 percent).
The study observed that to tackle the problem, there is a need give high priority to reducing food wastage in the first place. Beyond improving losses of crops on farms due to poor practices, doing more to better balance production with demand would mean not using natural resources to produce unneeded food in the first place, it added. "Moreover, in the event of a food surplus, re-use within the human food chain (finding secondary markets or donating extra food to feed vulnerable members of society) represents the best option. If the food is not fit for human consumption, the next best option is to divert it for livestock feed, conserving resources that would otherwise be used to produce commercial feedstuff," it suggested.
The reports says where re-use is not possible, recycling and recovery should be pursued: by-product recycling, anaerobic digestion, compositing, and incineration with energy recovery allow energy and nutrients to be recovered from food waste, representing a significant advantage over dumping it in landfills. Uneaten food that ends up rotting in landfills is a large producer of methane, a particularly harmful GHG, it added.