FAO: Between harvest and retail, 14 per cent of food is wasted – www.businessgreen.com

Billions of dollars of food waste is generated every year by poor supply chain management | Credit: Eivaisla

Fruit and vegetables the most vulnerable to food waste at all stages of the supply chain across rich and poor countries, according to UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation

From the moment crops are harvested to the point they hit supermarket shelves, 14 per cent of all food produced goes to waste.

That is the headline finding from a major new study from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released yesterday, which reveals that a lack of cold storage and refrigerated transport is exacting a heavy toll on the global food system – and fuelling the climate crisis in the process.

Reducing the global volumes of food waste will be essential for the UK to meet Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, the target for halving per capita food waste by 2030, the report warned.

Cutting food waste is also a shortcut to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, with a previous FAO study using 2011 data revealing that food waste is responsible for 3.6GT of CO2 emissions per year. Put another way, if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world.

According to yesterday’s FAO paper, fruit and vegetables are the foodstuffs most vulnerable to spoiling and becoming waste. In developing countries, high levels of waste are mainly due to a scarcity of refrigerated supply chains, although it is also a problem in higher income countries where poor facilities management or technical issues can frequently disrupt cold storage.

The paper pointed out that rates of food loss vary massively on a region by region basis, which suggests that further data is needed to build a full picture of when, where, and why food is wasted.

Better harvesting techniques and packaging are among the measures that could curb losses, it suggested, alongside governments stepping in to help farmers take action.

“As we strive to make progress towards reducing food loss and waste, we can only be truly effective if our efforts are informed by a solid understanding of the problem,” said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in the foreword to the report.