FOOD WASTE AND LOSS…AN ‘EMBRACED’ CANKER IN OUR SOCIETY

Food loss and waste has been embraced and perceived as something normal in our everyday activities. We’ve been short sighted and turn deaf ears to the cry of our food produce as they rot in the open market under the harsh condition from the sun.

According to a report by the Food and Agriculture organization of the United Nations, approximately 1.3 billion tons of food gets lost or wasted. Also, food loss and waste amounts to about US$680 billion in industrialized countries and US$310 billion in developing countries. Meanwhile, about 200 million children do

not have enough to eat and one in every nine people on earth goes to bed hungry each night.
  This is the menace the world is facing. What are we doing about this? It is reported that the number of people that die out of hunger each year is more than the number of people that die out of AIDS, tuberculosis and Cholera combined yet still we are wasting food.
  Fighting food waste and loss and in turn fighting hunger therefore means we must increase productivity, add value to our produce, reduce food loss and waste within the food supply chain. Good storage conditions and transportation methods must be put in place to reduce this problem. We should always check the expiry date of the products we buy and also consume food before it expires. Purchase the food you can eat at a particular time. I believe the little measure we put in place can help us in a long way. It can even help in reducing the sanitation crises we are facing. .

#STOPFOODWASTEANDLOSS

Author: Afari Edmund Larbi

A third year Food Science and Technology student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. Someone who is determined to achieve the best in life and channel it.
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