Hi, Welcome back!!!
Today, we will learn the truth about the amount of food wasted before it reaches the consumers. The Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations (FAO) estimated that a staggering 30-40% of total food production is wasted before it reaches the market. In 2011, it was estimated that the food lost is enough to feed 870 million hungry people, 4 times over. While everybody is worried about food security, and rightly so, what does it tell us about the pollution created from these massive waste?
More than 900 million tonnes of food is wasted annually (BBC, 2021)
Agriculture needs resources to grow such as machineries that run on fossil fuels. When food production is inefficient, these machineries run on more fossil fuels that pollute the air with Carbon dioxide (CO2). Moreover, crops need fertilisers and pesticides as well. The ammonia contained by these products reacted with the surrounding oxygen to create nitrous oxide (NOx), another greenhouse gases. In fact, according to the Economics Research Service of US Department of Agriculture (USDA), agriculture took up 10.5% of the total US greenhouse gases emissions in 2018.
While it is impossible to reduce the air pollution created by our agricultural activities to zero, it is very possible to reduce the amount of foodwaste during the production stage by:
- Optimising supply chain by reducing time taken for products to be delivered to the consumers
- Innovating to extend shelf life of food storage
- Support local agriculture to reduce the distance travelled from manufacturers to consumers
- Support sustainable solutions to the problem
I hope you enjoy this post and you find it meaningful. Look out for my next post where we will talk about the hazards of food packaging! Feel free to comment and suggest by leaving a reply below.