The Scale of Food Waste

What is the Scale?

How much food a person wastes varies greatly depending on what their income is , how they eat and where they live.

On average each person on the Earth wastes around 50 kg of edible food every year. 

But as you can imagine , the food wasted by a wealthy suburbanite varies greatly from someone living in poverty.

The following chart is an estimate of per person food waste for seven different regions of the globe , and is based on the 2011 FAO report , Global Food Losses and Food Waste.

The contrast between the levels of food waste in different regions of the world is stark.

The importance of production losses

In addition to food wasted by consumers an enormous volume of food is loss during production. These losses occur in different stages of the supply chain including harvest , storage , handling , transportation , processing , distribution and retail. 

The volume of edible food loss in all of these production stages is about 940 million tonnes each year. That equates to around 140 kg per person or 25% of total food supply , and highlights some of the inefficiencies in the global food supply.

Using data from the same report we can see the scale of both consumer waste and production losses as a share of total food supply in different food groups.

Almost half the Roots and Tubers  ( potato , cassava and sweet potato ) and Fruit & Vegetables produced globally are not consumed , while for Fish and Cereals it is roughly a third.

Second part is on the next page !