Thursday 12 September 2013

A Third Of All Food Thrown Away

About 21,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations, that's one person every 4 seconds so today's UN report that a third of all food produced globally remains uneaten and gets thrown away is even more galling.
A total of 1.3 billion tons of food a year, worth $750 billion, is thrown away, emitting 3.3 billion tons of
carbon dioxide, according to data collected by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. 
"We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practises, when 870 million people go hungry every day," says the FAO’s Director-General, José Graziano da Silva.
In the industrialised nations most of the blame for food ending up in the rubbish bin lies with consumers buying more than they actually need, while in the developing world it’s mostly bad agricultural techniques which result in the harvest not reaching the people.
Wasted food production also takes up 250 cubic kilometres of water each year. The water waste thus is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the Volga River, or is three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
Something had gone horribly wrong when some people die through lack of food and others are throwing food away because they have too much of it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree somethings went wrong. Too many people having children that can't feed them. Too many people living in places that can't produce enough food.

Q

Lucy said...

Or not enough people having children in places that have too much food.

Anonymous said...

im pretty sure the world doesnt need more people

q