Originally published on the CGS blog on October 5, 2015.
The UN recently announced its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 goals encompassing everything from education to peace and justice. Of them, Goal 2 is to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.” Though the goal itself and the subsequent sub goals highlight the need for sustainability, they seem to overlook a very important roadblock in the fight to end hunger: food waste.
As I’ve written before, about a third of all food grown around the world is never eaten. Though this is more often reported as occurring in the first world, many would be surprised to know how large the issue is in the developing world: “as much as half of the food grown or produced in the developing world simply never makes it to market.” Often this is because of a lack of technology, whether it’s a lack of refrigeration or of something “as simple as getting farmers in places like Kenya to use crates instead of burlap bags to transport their tomatoes to prevent them from bruising on the way to market.”
While it is probably a stretch to call the fixes for food waste “easy,” it is not one to say that implementing these fixes could have a huge impact on world hunger. By the UN’s own estimate, “if the amount of food wasted around the world were reduced by just 25% there would be enough food to feed all the people who are malnourished.” And yet, in its own SDG the UN fails to address food waste as a part of reaching this goal, advocating instead for increased agricultural productivity.
But pursuing a strategy of growth over efficient consumption has already proven to have its own consequences in the first world. Often we have too much production, leading to too much consumption, which in turn creates high amounts of food waste.
The problem is global but manifests itself in starkly different ways. In developing countries there are high levels of what is known as “food loss”, which is unintentional wastage, often due to poor equipment, transportation and infrastructure. In wealthy countries, there are low levels of unintentional losses but high levels of “food waste”, which involves food being thrown away by consumers because they have purchased too much, or by retailers who reject food because of exacting aesthetic standards. —Kate Lyons, The Guardian
That is why a goal to end hunger without reducing food waste just doesn’t make sense. Rather, we should try to find solutions that address our farming and consumption practices. In the developing world, this can be as simple as improving food storage technology; in the developed world, this will involve not only changing the way we sell food but also the way we consume it. (For more in-depth examples of people reducing food waste around the world, check out this article).
No matter how we start addressing food waste, it is crucial that we do so. So how about we start with ourselves? For those reading, I challenge you to meet Global Solutions’ Goal #1: try and cut your food waste by 25%, whether by changing what you buy, how you eat it, or how you dispose of it. Let’s see if we can feed the world.
