A family shares a meal in Eldoret. Experts are calling for increased production to stem hunger in developing countries, but the World Hunger Education Service points that the world produces enough food for everyone only that food produced is lost or wasted. Photo/File
What you need to know:
FAO report says the costs associated with food waste-related problems are estimated at $2.7 billion per year.
Unep estimates that about 1.3 billion tonnes of food are either lost or wasted annually.
I visited a friend in one of Kenyan capital’s suburbs and when she invited me to her kitchen to help her prepare a meal, we realised most of the food on the shelf had expired or gone stale.
The other had over stayed in the refrigerator and was not ‘fit for human consumption’ going by the moulds and foul smell it was emitting.
So instead of cooking, we stocked the trash can with expired food worth about $194 on that day then headed to a nearby eatery.
This was just one household of a young Kenyan woman living alone; I do not know what goes on in the houses of the bachelors who frequent kitchens less often.
Perhaps if I could survey the whole apartment block of 10 houses, the figure could have been about $1,940 or higher. Multiply this figure by five apartment blocks on that lane and you get $9700.
This drew my attention to the magnitude of the problem of food lost through waste, which is increasingly becoming a major concern in Africa and beyond.
Though attempts by researchers to quantify amount of food wasted in Africa has been futile due to limited data, it is so grave to an extent that Unep, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other partners on Tuesday rolled out a new global campaign— “Think.Eat.Save. Reduce Your Foodprint” to reduce food loss and waste along the entire chain of food production.
Unep estimates that about 1.3 billion tonnes of food are either lost or wasted annually.
To illustrate the seriousness of food wastage in the continent, a report titled The costs of Household Food Waste in South Africa estimates that about 9.04 million tonnes are lost annually.
In the report, the costs associated with food waste-related problems are estimated at $2.7 billion per year, or 0.82% of the country’s annual GDP.
This is one country alone and the trend is quite telling about other nations in Africa and beyond.
This comes against the backdrop of a FAO report, which estimates that almost 870 million people are chronically undernourished globally in 2010–12.
Though drought, bio-fuels, high oil prices, low grain stocks and speculation in food stocks are some of the factors that have in the past been blamed for the perennial hunger, food waste could aggravate this further in the coming years.
UN under-secretary-general, who is also Unep executive director, Achim Steiner said, “In a world of seven billion people, set to grow to nine billion by 2050, wasting food makes no sense — economically, environmentally and ethically.”
Out of the 870 million starving people, 239 million are from the sub-Saharan Africa. Ironically, large amounts of food produced is still lost in the production process or in the supply chain thus never reaching the consumer. Consumers also throw away food, most of it going bad due to poor storage.
Calls have been made to various governments to provide farmers with post-harvest infrastructure to prevent food from going to waste before it reaches consumers. This includes good transportation networks to the markets and proper storage facilities.
But, simple actions by consumers and food retailers can also significantly cut the loss.
As experts call for increased production to stem hunger in developing countries in view of the number of starving population globally, World Hunger Education Service points that the world produces enough food for everyone.
According to their statistics, agriculture alone generates about 17 per cent extra calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 per cent population boom globally. This, therefore, means hunger does not necessarily stem from poor food production alone.
Therefore, eradicating hunger and achieving the Millennium Development Goal target of halving the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing nations by 2015 will remain a myth if proper measures are not taken to stop food waste.
Reversing this wastage trend could translate into increased food security and enough food to save extra people from starving to death.
This change can start from your kitchen, not the government’s boardrooms or some hunger taskforce.
