Rome, May 11 (AFP) Around a third of the food produced in the world every year — around 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said today.
“Given the limited availability of natural resources it is more effective to reduce food losses than increase food production in order to feed a growing world population,” the FAO said in a report.
FAO said the amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world’s annual cereals crop.
Some 925 million people around the world suffer from hunger.
The report said that the problem in the developing world was mainly food losses — through, for example, crop failures and poor infrastructure.
In industrialised countries, the issue is more about “retailers and consumers throwing perfectly edible foodstuffs into the trash.