Facts to Know About Food Waste and Hunger [BE 22]

blog #22

 Facts to Know About Food Waste and Hunger
by: World Food Program USA

January 25th, 2019

Global hunger is an issue of distribution rather than production, 1/3 of all food production is wasted annually. In the developed world food waste often occurs in the kitchen, however in the developing world the majority of crops are lost at the harvest. Farmers, neither unable to afford technology nor access markets, watch as the crops rot in the field. Additionally, poor storage results in either pest infestations or contamination by mold. 

Memunatu Mumuni (left), Mari Ziblim and Abiba Murtapha clean rice at a World Food Programme project site in Nyankpala of Ghana.

THE EIGHT FACTS RECORDED FROM THE SITE


  1. the $1 trillion of food lost or wasted every year  would be enough to feed 2 billion people
  1. those in developed countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa each year.
  1. If wasted food were a country, it would be the third largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, after the U.S. and China.
  1. 30%-40% of food in the U.S. is wasted
  1. The amount of post-harvest food loss in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2011 = $4 billion, accumulating to more than the foreign aid the region received that year.
  1. Cutting global food waste in half by 2030 is one of the U.N.’s top priorities. 
  1. The World Food Programme’s (WFP) Zero Post-Harvest Losses project sells low-cost, locally produced grain silos to farmers and provides them with training on post-harvest crop management in five key areas: Harvesting, drying, threshing, solarization and storage.
  1. boosting access to local markets (sourcing school meals with locally grown crops/working with communities to build better roads and storage facilities/cargo bikes to mostly female farmers to increase their access to markets)

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