2013 WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY

Fresh fruit being sold  in the open.Most go to waste due to poor storage.

This year, June 5 was marked across the globe as World Environment Day, focussing on the theme ‘Think. Eat. Save. Reduce your foodprint.’

According to the UN Environment programme, UNEP, more than one point three billion tons of food valued at 1 trillion US dollars are lost or wasted each year by consumers, retailers and the hospitality industry.

This is equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, 1 in every 7 or 900 million people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger.  

Food waste is an enormous drain on natural resources and a contributor to negative environmental impacts. 

For example, it takes about 1,000 litres of water to produce 1 litre of milk and about 16,000 litres goes into a cow’s food to make a hamburger. The resulting greenhouse gas emissions from the cows themselves, and throughout the food supply chain, all end up in vain when we waste food.

In fact, global food production occupies 25% of all habitable land and is responsible for 70% of fresh water consumption, 80% of deforestation, and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. It is the largest single driver of biodiversity loss and land-use change.

A UN report released on June 4 2013, says that supporting smallholder farmers to play a greater role in food production and natural resource stewardship is one of the quickest ways to lift over one billion people out of poverty

Most of the 1.4 billion people living on under US$1.25 a day live in rural areas and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods, while an estimated 2.5 billion people are involved in full- or part-time smallholder agriculture. 

Smallholder farmers provide over 80 per cent of the food consumed in large parts of the developing world, particularly Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

A previous study showed that a one-per-cent increase in agricultural per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) reduced the poverty gap five times more than a one-per-cent increase in GDP in other sectors, especially amongst the poorest people.

However, increasing fragmentation of land, reduced investment support and the marginalization of small farms in economic and development policy have hampered the development of this vital contribution and left many smallholders vulnerable.

Current practices are undermining the ecological foundation of the global food system through overuse and the effects of agricultural pollution, thereby enhancing degradation, reducing ecosystem capacity to generate sustainable yields and threatening to negatively impact food security and poverty reduction. 

Aside from the moral implications of such wastage in a world where almost 900 million people go hungry every day, unconsumed food wastes both the energy put into growing it and the fuel spent on transporting produce across vast distances.

Food preservation is an effective way of saving food and preventing it from being wasted or lost. In Ghana, Nigeria and other West African countries, cassava tubers are processed  into gari, which can be stored for long period.

Restaurants, traders and individuals regularly dump their wasted food in skips like this one at Mamobi Market,Accra.