Consumers around the world could be wasting more than twice as much food as thought, according to an analysis that says previous figures have been underestimated. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) claims that around a third of food is lost or wasted. Its report is considered to have played a key part in food waste reduction becoming one of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
"The problem is much worse than we think. We have to wake up. I hope it's a wakeup call, "says Monika Verma from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She and her team took an unusual approach to calculate global food waste. Due to a shortage of comparable national data on such waste around the world, they instead inferred it. First, they compared how much food is produced—based on UN data on its availability—with how much is eaten, as calculated by the energy people need to consume and World Health Organization (WHO)data on body mass from 66 countries. Then they used World Bank data to factor in affluence (富裕).
This suggests that an average person wastes 527 kilo calories a day. That is about one-fifth of the 2, 500 kilo calories the average man needs to maintain a healthy body weight, according to the UK's National Health Service, or a quarter of the daily recommended intake for a woman. The previous FAO estimate came to only 214 kilocalories a day.
Verma has found that food waste starts to become a serious issue once people reach a total spending power of ﹩6. 70 a day. She says the work shows the importance of looking at different consumer attributes (属性). "Food waste is a luxury when you're poor; it's not when you're richer. The value of food goes down as you get richer. "
There are limitations to the new analysis. It only covers 67 percent of the world popula-tion and doesn't draw on data from some big food-wasting countries, including the US. The FAO says the research provides new perspectives (视角), but should be viewed as part of a body of literature. Andrea Cattaneo at the FAO has some doubts about the results, such as Japan coming out as a country that wastes lots of food, which he says" is unlikely to reflect the reality."
Verma says the biggest assumption the new analysis makes is that poorer countries will develop the same way as richer ones did in the past. That risks a" brewing potential future problem" of even more food waste, she and her colleagues warn.
