Food waste -draft

[trishtracking]

Name
Trish

Describe the problem you'd like to solve

Food waste is one of the biggest failures of the market economy.

It's expensive
Around 33-50% ($1 trillion worth!) of all food produced globally doesn't get eaten. Statistics for the USA show that food waste represents 1.3% of their total GDP. It's a massive market inefficiency, the kind of which does not persist in other industries.

People suffer

800 million people worldwide go hungry daily. in the UK for example, over 1 million people accessed a food bank last year. These people could be sufficiently fed on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the USA, UK and Europe each year.

Because we have a globalised food supply system, demand for food in the West can drive up the price of food grown for export in developing countries, as well as displace the growth of crops to feed native populations and drive accelerated degradation of natural habitats.

It's an environmental catastrophy

Food waste is really, really bad for the environment. It takes a land mass larger than China to grow the food each year that is ultimately never eaten – land that has been deforested, species that have been driven to extinction, indigenous populations that have been moved, soil that has been degraded – all to produce food that we then just throw away. In addition, food that is never eaten accounts for a quarter of fresh water consumption globally.

Not only are all of the resources that went into creating the uneaten food wasted (land, water, labour, energy, manufacturing, packaging, etc), but when food waste goes to landfill, which is where the vast majority of it ends up, it decomposes without access to oxygen and creates methane, which is 23x more deadly than carbon dioxide.

Who are the stakeholders?
Who would this benefit? Who would be affected by it?

What is currently being done to solve this problem?
Whether it's effective or not, what is in place at the moment to solve this problem?

[RihardsJ]

People should not starve when there is so much food waste! My favourite idea!