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- IFPRI's Statement on Biotechnology
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- Interview with David Nabarro
- Biofuels: A Win-Win Approach That Can Serve the Poor
- Food Wastage Can and Should Be Reduced
IFPRI ForumA recent Austrian documentary entitled 'We Feed the World' has focused attention in Europe and elsewhere on the juxtaposition between the overconsumption of resources in rich countries and hunger and poverty in the developing world.
One byproduct of this overconsumption is food wastage. According to the film, which is the most successful documentary in Austrian history, Vienna disposes of enough unsold bread every day to supply Austria's second largest city, Graz. The United Kingdom's Economic and Social Research Council estimates UK households throw away 378 pounds of food per person each year, while the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) calculates 20 percent of the country's food goes to waste, representing an annual value of about $31 billion in lost resources. Such wastage is not productive, sustainable, or ethical.
While food is being squandered in rich countries, 800 million people around the world often do not know where their next meal is coming from, 166 million children are undernourished, and 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. As the film explicitly states, any child who dies of hunger today-almost 60 years after the right to food was recognized as a basic human right-is the victim of a crime against humanity.
"The persistence of hunger in a world of plenty is the most profound moral contradiction of our age," says IFPRI researcher Marc Cohen.
The USDA estimates that roughly 49 million people could be fed each year by the United States' lost food resources. While it may be too simplistic to assume that what is wasted in one part of the world can be used to feed people in another, there must be ways to better organize the food chain so as to recoup and redirect some of the billions of dollars that are currently being tossed into the garbage each year. Not only could that kind of money feed many people who are currently going hungry, it could fund universal primary education and help meet some of the other Millennium Development Goals. It could also go a long way toward enabling developed countries to meet their pledge to devote 0.7 percent of GNP to development assistance. And yet, more food and more opportunities are being wasted every year.
While some local and national governments have begun to enact food recovery programs, more could be done to alert consumers, producers, and policymakers to opportunities for preventing such an egregious loss of resources along the whole food chain. It is a moral imperative as well as an economic necessity.