The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) wanted to find out per capita food waste generated after the food reached retail stores, restaurants and canteens and homes. They scoured research studies and data to estimate the amount wasted.
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Only 52 countries had data on the volume of food waste generated per capita, UNEP reported in the Food Waste Index, 2021.
In India, the researchers could find only three studies to rely on. All of them dealt with food waste generated at only the household level.
Using this limited data, they calculated the waste generated across the globe. According to the extrapolated data:
Every individual wastes some 121 kilograms of food each year. Out of this, 74 kg is at the household level while 32 kg and 15 kg are at food service and retail level respectively. Overall, 17 per cent of food is lost between retail and home.
Contrary to popular belief, the findings showed that low-income countries wasted more food than the rich ones. While high-income countries wasted 79 kg per capita per year of food at the household level, upper-middle income and lower-middle income countries wasted 76 and 91 kg per capita per year of food respectively.
But there is a catch. The reason for this conflicting finding is the way food waste has been defined in the study: It included inedible parts such as bones, shells and vegetable peels along with the edible portions.
This definition overlooks the fact that in developed countries, processed food reaches homes while in lower-income countries, raw food is brought in and meals are prepared from scratch. This means that in poor countries, inedible parts are discarded at household levels.
In developed countries, similar waste would have been generated at the processing unit, but it is not in the purview of UNEP’s index.
The data on the breakdown between food and inedible parts wasted is available only in a few high-income countries. It showed that around 50 per cent of food wasted at home is inedible. The report acknowledged that the proportion of inedible parts may be higher in lower-income countries, but because the data unavailable, it could not factor the same in their results.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization created the Food Loss Index in 2018, which measures losses across the supply chain, up to but not including retail. This index, however, does not provide data comparable with the Food Waste Index and looks only at limited commodities.
Nearly 14 per cent of food across the globe is wasted during agriculture and processing level, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food and Agriculture report published in 2019.
Central and southern Asia accounted for most food loss (20 per cent) between post harvest and distribution periods. But inedible food does not get recorded here either.
UNEP suggests that countries disaggregate the data on food waste. Other than separating the edible from the inedible, information on the destination of waste — sewers, home composting and animal feed — would help in policies and interventions to reduce waste.
Developing as well as poor countries need to quickly get their acts together and collate data on food waste in local conditions. For India, which fails even to segregate wet and dry waste, this may remain a pipe dream for a long time.
Segregation would also help use traditional methods of dealing with waste. In rural areas, a large part of the vegetable waste is used to feed livestock.
Reducing food waste is crucial for many reasons. One, the food wasted could have been fed to someone. About 25 per cent of available calories and protein are lost globally. This includes 10-15 per cent fats and 18-41 per cent vitamins and minerals, including 23-33 per cent of vitamin A, folate, calcium, iron and zinc.
At the same time, resources such as water, land, energy, fertilisers used to grow food are also wasted.
Food systems have been identified as one of the major contributors to climate change. The United Nations-mandated Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 underlines that countries halve their per capita food waste.
A 50 per cent reduction in food waste alone could meet the 2 degrees Celsius limit set under the Paris Agreement.
India produces 50 kg / capita / year of food waste at the household level, according to the baseline created by UNEP. If half of this is inedible waste, the remaining 25 kg / capita / year can be easily managed.
Food Waste and Climate Change
A landmark United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2018 on global warming made clear the disastrous effects of allowing the global average temperature to increase by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) (measured between 1750 and 2100).The report indicated a pathway to avoid catastrophe
The Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use sector accounted for around 13 per cent of CO2, 44 per cent of methane and 81 per cent of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from human activities between 2007 and 2016.
That is around 13 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent or 23 per cent of total net anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). For a two-in-three chance of staying within 1.5°C of warming, methane emissions from agriculture need to reduce by 24 to 47 per cent by 2050 (relative to a 2010 baseline)
N2O emissions from the same sector need to reduce as much as 26 per cent. The report also highlighted the need for carbon sequestration — trapping carbon through technological or natural solutions — including enhancing soil carbon through sustainable land management.
The ‘food’ sector is broader than agriculture. It includes harvesting, transportation, storage and retail of food crops and products. Taken as its own sector, it accounts for between 21 and 37 per cent of the total human-caused GHG emissions.
Around 30 per cent of food produced is wasted, accounting for around 4.5 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent or 8 to 10 per cent of global GHG emissions.
Food waste, which represents irresponsible consumption, should be an immediate target of emission reduction efforts in this sector. As with most efforts to address the climate crisis, the focus needs to be on the developed world. The median amount of food waste per capita in large developed economies is significantly higher than in large developing economies, according to data available on the Food and Agricultural Organization.
The developing country median is significantly propped up by Brazil, which has the highest figure for per capita food waste (477 kg per 1,000 people) for any country, by quite a margin.
That is largely explained by Brazil’s domestic bio-fuels sector that generates a huge amount of sugarcane demand (and waste).
Without Brazil and its massive biofuel footprint, the median per capita food waste for large developing economies is around 57 kg, significantly lower than the developed countries’ median.
The IPCC recognises the value of replacing fuels like oil and natural gas with biofuels, but also cautions that they place huge demands on land, leading to desertification, land degradation and food insecurity. Precisely estimating the climate impact of this waste is a challenge. The emissions intensity of food production and distribution systems varies across economies.
Per capita food wastage footprint on climate in high-income countries is more than double that of low-income countries due to wasteful food distribution and consumption patterns in high-income countries, according to a 2011 FAO estimate.
The data clearly explains why food waste has to be contained in order to fight climate change. And in doing so, it also highlights the need for food waste management and reduction.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.