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Sep 17, 2013 / in Blog Articles

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation its report Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources is the first study to analyse the impacts of global food wastage from an environmental perspective, looking specifically at its consequences for the climate, water and land use, and biodiversity.  Among its key findings: Each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia’s Volga River and is responsible for adding 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet’s atmosphere.The photograph alongside shows wheat spilling from a ripped sack during transport. When food is lost or wasted, the natural resources used to produce it are also squandered.And beyond its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually, FAO’s report estimates. “All of us – farmers and fishers; food processors and supermarkets; local and national governments; individual consumers — must make changes at every link of the human food chain to prevent food wastage from happening in the first place, and re-use or recycle it when we can’t,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva. “We simply cannot allow one-third of all the food we produce to go to waste or be lost because of inappropriate practices, when 870 million people go hungry every day,” he added.We at Filcon Filters cannot do much about food loss which is the unintended reduction in food available for human consumption owing to inefficiencies in supply chains or during production or postharvesting inefficiencies. When it comes to food waste, which is the intentional discarding of edible food, we can individually do our bit. When it comes to water, Filcon continues to promote water treatment, recycling and filtration especially in a water deprived country such as South Africa,