It is a staggering loss by all standards — Rs133 billion (Dh7.85 billion) worth of fruits and vegetables are wasted every year in India and this is ironic for many reasons. Even today, a significant percentage of Indians live below the poverty line. Millions of them struggle to be able to afford one decent meal a day. The colossal quantity of food being wasted could instead have been channelled to tackle the needs of the hungry and the poor, had there been an effective food supply chain in India with a proper infrastructure for storage and distribution. Globally too, wastage of food has assumed disturbing proportions. In the US, for instance, food wastage figures vary from 29.5 to 50 tonnes annually, while the United Kingdom and Japan waste about 30-40 per cent of the food they grow.
According to reports, the total surplus of food produce in the US alone could, if well managed, feed every belly in the world. Therefore, in a world with distressing imbalances in the way food is grown and consumed, such high volumes of food falling into landfills needs urgent attention.
Many of the problems troubling India, including price rise, farmers’ agitations, ineffectiveness of food subsidy schemes and enduring poverty, would be on a diminishing curve if it could pay attention to the logistics of the food supply chain. But sadly, even after 66 years of independence, the country’s policy-makers have not been able to get it right.
Food wastage, apart from making the global community guilty of the moral transgression of depriving the poor and the hungry of the world from eating a decent meal a day, also condemns the use of the world’s limited and precious resources — water, land and human hours — as unsustainable practices. To grow so much using so many resources and then to waste a large part of it is a crime we need to stop committing. If poverty has to be effectively tackled across the globe, the food we grow must reach its intended destination — human bellies — rather than be diverted to the dumping ground of our excesses, landfills.
