> An estimated 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted globally each year, one third of all food produced for human consumption, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
> The amount of food lost or wasted costs 2.6 trillion USD annually and is more than enough to feed all the 815 million hungry people in the world - four times over.
> According to the FAO, high- and low-income countries discard similar amounts of food — 670 and 630 million tonnes, respectively — but there is a major difference in where and how that loss occurs.
> In low-income countries, loss occurs more often in the earlier stages. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 83 per cent of food is lost during production, handling/storage and processing, while just five per cent is wasted by consumers, according to the World Resources Institute. Conversely, in North America and Oceania, 32 per cent is lost in earlier stages, and 61 per cent is wasted by consumers.
So yeah, food waste is still an issue although more restricted to developed countries.
https://en.reset.org/knowledge/global-food-waste-and-its-env...
Even if the food is grown locally, if it costs 50 cents per piece of fruit to ship them to America where they'll sell for $2 each, that's still dramatically more lucrative than selling them locally for $1 each, which might be a day's wage.
Even if you're producing food locally and people can afford to buy it, that could all change if social or political instability wreaks havoc on the local infrastructure and economy.
Unfortunately, even in giving food aid to those who can't feed themselves for the prior reasons, you have now destroyed the market for local food production which justifies investment in the infrastructure that will keep them from starving should the aid ever dry up. Best case scenario, the farms exist but grow cash crops instead of food staples; worst case scenario the region loses the experience and the means to grow its own food and is rendered permanently dependent on aid.
World hunger is a symptom of global poverty and underdevelopment, and reducing food waste won't fix those problems, it can even exacerbate them. Real progress will require systemic and complicated changes.
That doesn't seem true to me. A lot of food is wasted by your retailers, restaurants and households. They are within range of people suffering from food insecurity.
> An estimated 43 billion pounds of food were wasted in US retail stores in 2010. 33 This is particularly disconcerting given that in 2016, 12.3 percent of American households were food insecure. 34 Most of the loss in retail operations is in perishables, including baked goods, produce, meat, seafood and prepared meals. 35 The USDA estimates that supermarkets lose $15 billion annually in unsold fruit and vegetables alone. 36 Unfortunately, wasteful practices in the retail industry are often viewed as good business strategies. Some of the main drivers for food loss at retail stores include: overstocked product displays, expectation of cosmetic perfection of fruits, vegetables and other foods, oversized packages, the availability of prepared food until closing, expired “sell by” dates, damaged goods, outdated seasonal items, over purchasing of unpopular foods and under staffing.
> US restaurants generate an estimated 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste each year. Institutions — including schools, hotels and hospitals — generate an additional 7 to 11 billion pounds per year.
> Households are responsible for the largest portion of all food waste. ReFED estimates that US households waste 76 billion pounds of food per year. 45 Approximately 40 to 50 percent of food waste (including 51 to 63 percent of seafood waste 46 happens at level of the consumer. 47 In the US, an average person wastes 238 pounds of food per year (21 percent of the food they buy), costing them $1,800 per year. 48 In terms of total mass, fresh fruits and vegetables account for the largest losses at the consumer level (19 percent of fruits and 22 percent of vegetables), followed by dairy (20 percent), meat (21 percent) and seafood (31 percent).
Production of food costs in many resources that take a long time to replenish. Even if you remove the world hunger angle from this, why are we producing food in excess?
Obviously, there are some good reasons and problems but many countries pile up on excess buffer stock which is a solvable problem without requiring improvement to the storage and other handling infra, right?
Same for retailers, consumers and restaurants. To certain extent at least. No one is perfect but the current trend is ridiculous.
Check: https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/
Because increased supply is always more efficient. If you want one coconut, growing a coconut tree from scratch is an expensive and time consuming affair. If you want 1 million coconuts, suddenly the infrastructure for growing coconuts is economical. The absolute expense is higher, but the marginal expense is much lower.
Food insecurity in developed countries like the US doesn't mean that there is no food available and you're starving to death. Most food insecurity is people who can't easily get nutritious food that will last in socially acceptable ways. You can hand out the food that a grocery store was going to throw away - food a bit past their shelf life or which has some defect - but this would still count as them being food insecure. Only about 20% of the very food insecure (which is 5.7% of Americans) actually report going a single day without eating.
Again we have situations of logistics problems. If people in an rural rustbelt town are eating cheap junk food because they need to save money to make their mortgage payments, it doesn't do them much good if a grocery store 2 hours away leaves food on the shelf an extra two days. Getting food to the people who need it at a pricepoint they can afford without causing other quality of life problems is the issue. If you deal with the poverty, none of these people are going to have any problem getting a meal.
Seems a bit much, no?
That's almost 19 million people in a developed country.
I understand that food insecurity and hunger is a logistics problem but consumer wastage is still huge. So are other forms of wastage that can be reduced without any problems in efficiency.
One example I gave was excess buffer stock by government in many countries. You can't buy 12 blocks of grains when you only have 10 blocks of storage. I guess, I am naive as to why someone would do that and waste 4 blocks of grain in the process. There is lack of distribution channels here but why purchase excess grains that you can't distribute anyway?
> Because increased supply is always more efficient. If you want one coconut, growing a coconut tree from scratch is an expensive and time consuming affair. If you want 1 million coconuts, suddenly the infrastructure for growing coconuts is economical. The absolute expense is higher, but the marginal expense is much lower.
I am aware. As I said, I don't believe it's more efficient in many cases. We can tackle those. Reducing production is a fine strategy. It might cost more in future to all of us.
I live in a bit deserted place and people use groundwater for farming. They are using excessive resources for a demand that doesn't exist and is artificially created by few actors. This will increase the price of crops in the long term and may make this land unsustainable.
You can argue that overproduction has other problems, certainly the environmental issues are valid, but it is undeniable that producing excessive quantities of food reduces the price.
As for why we would produce more than we need, we like options. Maybe I want a salad tonight, maybe a steak, maybe a sandwich. In buying excess, I have all options open to me and I'll simply throw out whatever I don't choose. If that wasted food could magically teleport into the hands of a starving person, then it would be stupid to let it go to waste. But in reality, if I don't buy it then it will just get thrown out by the grocery store, and if they don't buy it then it won't be grown. Yes it costs resources to grow and transport this excess food, but that's what I'm paying for when I buy it. If the farmer isn't using the money I'm ultimately paying him to replenish the local aquifer, it doesn't matter whether the food he produces gets eaten or buried or turned into weird sex toys.
As for food insecurity being high in developed nations, when you look at how people actually live and how food insecurity is defined, it makes perfect sense. To not be food insecure, you need to buy (not be given) nutritious, high quality (ie more expensive) food. You can survive, however, without paying for nutritious high quality food. A 30 dollar bag of rice will feed an adult for a month; it might not be pleasant but it will suffice. A regular, food secure diet might cost 10 times that much. It's a luxury most of us can afford, but it's still a luxury. Now consider the costs most people have: rent, transportation, healthcare, food. If you have an unexpected expense, you can't pay less rent, or pay less transportation, or stop taking your necessary medication. On the other hand you have a lot of control over the amount you spend on food. If you need 200 extra bucks, eating peanut butter sandwiches for a few days doesn't seem that bad. Most people aren't food insecure for long periods of time, but briefly tighten their belts (literally) during rough patches. If you want people to not be food insecure, you need to solve the problem of them needing more money to get by, which means either getting them more excess income (getting them out of poverty) or reducing unexpected expenses (more social welfare). But unless you make high quality, nutritious food as cheap as low quality food, there will always be some people who forego the luxury.
Hunger is a real issue, overproduction might be an issue, but solving one has no effect on the other.
I already agree that reducing production won't have as much impact on the distribution side.
If you look back again, my point was reducing waste will lead to improvement in the distribution which is slightly different. Perfectly fine food is wasted by retailers and restaurants within easy range of people who might benefit from discounted or free products.
Giving up Amazon is different. They actually ship me real, tangible items I need. Items that I'd have to track down from different retailers who would more than likely take longer to get those items to me. I'm making an effort to get certain items from other sources (electronics from Newegg, for example), but I'm still a Prime member.
Google is in between, I guess. I use DuckDuckGo by default. But, I admit, I sometimes do a "!g" when I'm not satisfied with DDG's results.
But in all, I'm much more disturbed by what the Social Media giants have been up to than Amazon, Google, and Apple, so there's a bit more motivation in that regard.
The other side of this is that Amazon's marketplace is filled with counterfeit products and is built on questionable labor practices. They are big enough to distort the entire market and make small businesses compete in unnatural/suboptimal ways in order to satisfy Amazon. The fast shipping and some of the cheap pricing is taking advantage of a public good (the Post Office) and it's unclear, especially recently, if Amazon is being given preferential treatment in their contracts.
All in all, while it may be more convenient some of the time, the concentration of power and money is not healthy long term for a democratic country. It seems to me that a properly lead and funded Post Office and a dynamic, competitive marketplace of small and medium sized businesses would provide just as good an experience and doesn't have the risk of market capture or complex lobbying operations popping up.
Practically everyone will have an Apple/Google phone. You can de-Googlfy or de-Applfy but you can't do both.
Facebook, yeah you don't need it. But if you want to see pictures of your nephew and that's where they're posted you don't have much choice.
Microsoft you can get away from but pretty much anyone buying a computer has to pay the MS tax (or the Apple tax). Hard to avoid Office, LinkedIn, or GitHub at work as well.
As some tech journalists found a little while back (don't have the links, but it was pretty prominent), boycotting Amazon in all its myriad forms online is all but impossible—so much of the internet's infrastructure currently runs on AWS.
The idea that the correct action for cases such of these is individual action like boycotts, deleting your Facebook account, or ordering goods (at 15% higher prices, with an extra week of shipping delay) from 23 different online specialty retailers or manufacturers instead of Amazon, is bullshit. It's the same logic that says the way to beat global warming is for you to turn off the lights in your bedroom when you leave, rather than fighting to make oil companies cap burning gas flares or whatnot.
Demanding that people give up extra convenience or discounts in order to "send a message" to megacorporations that will never notice, let alone care, until significant double-digit percentages of all global users start doing this, during the most terrifying, emotionally draining, and financially unstable period in living memory is not merely ineffective, it's also deeply insensitive and morally bankrupt.
In fact, polls seem to suggest that's exactly the (seemingly contradictory) viewpoint of many Americans[1].
I suspect the thinking is along the lines of, "Amazon makes my life better, but I worry about their ability to abuse their power in the future."
1. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/18/20870938/b...