3 min readNew DelhiOct 25, 2012 04:01 PM IST
First published on: Oct 25, 2012 at 04:01 PM IST
The total food wasted every year globally is enough to feed 500 million people without any extra burden on natural resources,a top official of United Nation’s body Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO has said.
“Around one third of all the food produced in the world is lost or wasted every year,” FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva said,adding the elimination of this wastage is an important step in achieving zero hunger. According to a statement on the UN agency’s website,Graziano da Silva said this quantity was enough to feed an extra 500 million people without putting additional pressure on natural resources.
As per an earlier report by FAO,food losses and waste amount to roughly USD 680 billion in industrialised countries and USD 310 billion in developing countries.
Urging all international food communities and players in the global food system to come together for eradicating hunger from the earth “within our lifetimes”,he said achieving zero hunger would,among other measures,require moving to eliminate food losses and waste.
FAO chief said one of the reason food was wasted was because of “a tendency to excessive consumption in middle and high-income countries”.
The result was that around 1.5 billion people are overweight compared to 868 million undernourished,he added. Earlier this month,United Nations Environment Programme UNEP said wastage of food all over the world is a cause of concern and countries need to invest in increasing storage capacities to meet the food requirements of future.
“We are raising the awareness among countries on food wastage and telling the governments and others to pay attention to it. In some developing countries it is an issue of distribution and storage,” UNEP Deputy Executive Director and UN Assistant Secretary General Amina Mohamed had said. Last year,terming food wastage at weddings and social gatherings as “criminal”,Food and Consumer Affairs Minister K V Thomas had said the government could bring a new law in this regard and also launch an awareness campaign to curb it. “There is huge wastage of food at weddings and other social functions. It is a criminal wastage. We are finding out mechanism to bring down such wastage of food,” he had said.
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