1.3 Billion Tons of Food Wasted Globally Each Year

ROMEA staggering 1.3 billion tons of wasted food per year has amounted to $750 billion dollars of direct economic impact annually, along with an array of environmental issues threatening the natural resources necessary to continue feeding the growing population, according to a new report from the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The report, "Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources", analyzed the impact of global food wastage from an environmental perspective, looking specifically at its consequences for the climate, water and land use and biodiversity.

Key findings conclude that each year, food that is produced but not eaten (approximately 30% to 50% globally) guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia's Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere. Beyond its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually, FAO's report estimates.

"All of usfarmers and fishers, food processors and supermarkets, local and national governments, individual consumersmust make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can't," said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva. "We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day."

FAO has published a comprehensive "tool-kit" that contains recommendations on how food loss and waste can be reduced at every stage of the food chain. The tool-kit profiles a number of projects around the world that show how national and local governments, farmers, businesses, and individual consumers can take steps to tackle the problem.