Rome: One third of the food produced worldwide is wasted, costing the global economy around $750 billion a year, a new report by the UN food agency said. The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said some 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted every year, with the Asia region including China seen as the worst culprit.
The food agency's director general, Jose Graziano da Silva, told a press conference that in total, "one third of the food produced today is lost or wasted... equivalent to the Gross Domestic Production (GDP) of Switzerland."
"We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day," he added.
Achim Steiner, head of the United Nation's Environment Programme (UNEP), described it as "a staggering phenomenon".
"This is a big wake up call," he told the joint press conference. "It will take less than 37 years to add another two billion people to the global population. How will we feed ourselves in the future?"
Steiner said that eliminating food wastage had "enormous potential" to reduce hunger and called on citizens to take individual action to tackle the issue.
"Each one of us has a role to play. Starting with the ridiculous phenomenon in wealthy countries of not buying crooked vegetables anymore," he said, adding that over-zealous observation of sell-by dates was also leading to huge quantities of food being thrown away. High-income countries waste during food consumption, while developing countries lose food during production, FAO said.
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