Food Waste Index: 1.05 billion tonnes wasted

The world wasted 1.05 billion tonnes of food in 2022, about 19% of all food available to consumers, according to the Food Waste Index Report 2024, by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), published on March 27, 2024. That is more than 1 billion meals a day, in a year when 783 million people were going hungry.

What happened

The Food Waste Index is the UN's main measure of food waste in retail, food services and the home. The 2024 edition, produced with the British organization WRAP, brings the most complete global estimate so far, with data from 2022.

The central figures, according to UN News and CNN Brasil:

• Households: 631 million tonnes, about 60% of the total.
• Food services: 290 million tonnes.
• Retail: 131 million tonnes.
• Per person: 79 kilos of food wasted per year, on average.
• Before the consumer: FAO estimates that another 13% of food is lost between harvest and retail.
• Climate: food loss and waste account for 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The report brought two findings that run against common sense. The first is that household waste is not just a rich-country matter: high-income, upper-middle-income and lower-middle-income countries differ, on average, by just 7 kilos per person per year. The second is that hotter countries tend to waste more at home, partly because adequate refrigeration is lacking and because heat speeds up the spoilage of fresh food.

UNEP also recalls target 12.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals, which calls for halving per capita food waste by 2030, and cites countries that have already shown measurable reductions through partnerships between government and business.

Why it matters

Waste is the other face of hunger. Food thrown away consumed land, water, fertilizer, fuel and human labor, and fed no one. When it rots in a landfill, it also produces methane, a gas that warms the planet much more than carbon dioxide in the short term.

The finding about heat weighs on Brazil and Latin America. In hot regions, with unstable power and little cold chain, fresh food has a short shelf life at every stage: on the truck, at the wholesale market, on the shelf and in the kitchen. Reducing waste in these places depends less on campaigns and more on preservation technology and logistics.

In Bairo's view

For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, the Food Waste Index is numerical proof of a sentence that guides his work on the subject: the food exists, what is missing is the path. In his reading, more than a billion meals thrown away a day, in a world with hundreds of millions of hungry people, is not a production problem. It is a defect of connection between where there is surplus and where there is shortage.

Bairo also draws attention to the point about heat. He sees that the refrigerator, which seems ordinary in many homes, is precisely what is missing in many communities and in many humanitarian operations. That is why, in his view, part of the answer lies in turning perishable food into shelf-stable food before it is lost.

Where this meets the ecosystem

Instituto CEASA, the humanitarian front founded by Bairo, proposes exactly this transformation: collecting the surplus of the wholesale supply centers, selecting what is good and processing it in an autoclave, the heat-and-pressure principle of canning, to obtain food that does not depend on refrigeration. The design aims at a shelf life of up to two years without refrigeration, which still depends on a stability study and registration with health authorities. It is a proposal being set up. Stated website: institutoceasa.org (site under construction).

At the other end of the chain, CEASA Bank, an agribusiness financial platform that operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, proposes that traders at the supply centers have fast quotes and invoices. Selling faster also means losing less.

Sources

• UNEP, 03/27/2024: World squanders over 1 billion meals a day – UN report
• UNEP: Food Waste Index Report 2024
• UN News, 03/27/2024: With 783 million people going hungry, a fifth of all food goes to waste
• CNN Brasil, 03/27/2024: Mundo desperdiça mais de 1 bilhão de refeições todos os dias, aponta ONU (World wastes more than 1 billion meals every day, UN says)

Read also

• Ceasas: 16.6 million tonnes and the end-of-day surplus
• Autoclave and retort pouch: safe food without a refrigerator
• How does food last two years without refrigeration?
• What to do with leftover food