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Food waste

July 25, 2016

Discarded, left to rot or never harvested because its the wrong shape of size, a total of 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year. Read on and share your thoughts on one of the biggest scandals of our time.

https://p.dw.com/p/1JURF
Klima Ausflug
Image: DW/A.-S. Bändlin

A few facts on food waste. Throwing away, or failing to collect those 1.3 billion tons of comestibles from the fields in the first place, is tantamount to burning one trillion dollars. That's ONE TRILLION dollars up in smoke, or at least up in climate-change inducing gas - for what?

rotten sweetcorn
Image: Colourbox

Almost half (45 percent) of fruit and vegetables produced globally is wasted. And a quarter of the food we fail to eat could feed the near 800 million people in the world who simply don't have enough.

Boxes of vegetables
Image: Joana Baptista

The food wasted in the world's most affluent countries is almost equivalent to all the food produced in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Open palms hold a few grains
Image: picture alliance/dpa/A. Ufumeli

If the food we waste were a country, it would be the third largest producer of carbon dioxide (3.3 billion tons) in the world. Though in fact it is not a country, it is still a major contributor to climate change.

A storm rages around trees on a beach
Image: Getty Images/AFP/G. Johnson

The average European or North African consumer wastes around 100 kilos of food every year - 30 kilos more than their average body weight, and 15 times more waste than a typical African consumer. We can do better, surely?

USA Burger mit einer extra Scheibe Fleisch
Image: Getty Images/J. Sullivan

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