Lost food, wasted resources: global food supply chain losses and their impacts on freshwater, cropland, and fertiliser use.

By Matti Kummu, de H. Moel, M. Porkka, Stefan Siebert, Olli Varis, Philip J. Ward. Science of the Total Environment, 2012

1,256 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Reducing food losses and waste is considered to be one of the most promising measures to improve food security in the coming decades. Food losses also affect our use of resources, such as freshwater, cropland, and fertilisers. In this paper we estimate the global food supply losses due to lost and wasted food crops, and the resources used to produce them. We also quantify the potential food supply and resource savings that could be made by reducing food losses and waste. We used publically available global databases to conduct the study at the country level. We found that around one quarter of the produced food supply (614 kcal/cap/day) is lost within the food supply chain (FSC). The production of these lost and wasted food crops accounts for 24% of total freshwater resources used in food crop production (27 m(3)/cap/yr), 23% of total global cropland area (31 × 10(-3)ha/cap/yr), and 23% of total global fertiliser use (4.3 kg/cap/yr). The per capita use of resources for food losses is largest in North Africa & West-Central Asia (freshwater and cropland) and North America & Oceania (fertilisers). The smallest per capita use of resources for food losses is found in Sub-Saharan Africa (freshwater and fertilisers) and in Industrialised Asia (cropland). Relative to total food production, the smallest food supply and resource losses occur in South & Southeast Asia. If the lowest loss and waste percentages achieved in any region in each step of the FSC could be reached globally, food supply losses could be halved. By doing this, there would be enough food for approximately one billion extra people. Reducing the food losses and waste would thus be an important step towards increased food security, and would also increase the efficiency of resource use in food production.

Subfields: Food Science, Nutrition and Dietetics, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f900a90f73f7fac8af31b5f7355541e2994fa4a

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing global land use : balancing consumption with sustainable supply (2014, background): “If global food losses and waste were halved by 2025, almost one billion more people could be fed (Kummu et al. 2012).”
Food Losses and Food Waste in China: A First Estimate (2014, background): “…environmental consequences in two ways: (i) a waste of upstream resource inputs, e.g., water (Ridoutt et al. 2010; Lundqvist et al. 2008), land use (Kummu et al. 2012), and energy (Cu llar and ebber 2010), and their embodied environmental impacts, e.g., greenhouse gas emissions (WRAP and WWF 2011;…”
Sustainability of global water use: past reconstruction and future projections (2014, background): “…measures have been proposed, involving innovations in water and food technology, water management and governance, dietary change, and economic incentives (e.g., environmental tax) (Gleick et al 2010, MacDonald 2010, Vörösmarty et al 2010, Fader et al 2010, 2013, Foley et al 2011, Kummu et al 2012).”
Global food self-sufficiency in the 21st century under sustainable intensification of agriculture (2020, background): “…by decreasing meat consumption and shifting to plant-based diets (Cassidy et al 2013, Jalava et al 2014, Davis et al 2014), reducing food waste (Kummu et al 2012), minimizing inefficiencies in resource use through improved technology and management (Springmann et al 2018), optimization in the…”
Global food waste across the income spectrum: Implications for food prices, production and resource use (2020, background): “Resources used in the production of food that ends up being lost and wasted accounts for almost one-fourth of the overall global cropland and fertilizer use (Kummu et al., 2012) contributing around 3.”
Quantity and quality food losses across the value Chain: A Comparative analysis (2020, neutral): “Some studies further translate quantity losses into caloric terms (e.g., Buzby et al., 2014; Kummu et al., 2012; Lipinski et al., 2013), but do not capture qualitative dimensions such as loss of nutritional content and physical appearance (Affognon et al., 2014).”
Food loss and Waste Reduction as an Integral Part of a Circular Economy (2017, background): “FLW can occur at every stage of the food value chain, from initial agricultural production down to final household consumption (Parfitt et al., 2010; Gustavsson et al., 2011; Kummu et al., 2012).”
Spatial decoupling of agricultural production and consumption: quantifying dependences of countries on food imports due to domestic land and water constraints (2013, background): “While it is very difficult to estimate the contribution of the first one, the latter has the potential of adding up to 50% to global food production or reducing the use of water, land and fertilizers by around one quarter (Foley et al 2011, Godfray et al 2010, Kummu et al 2012).”