Problem of Food Waste and Food Distribution

A little while ago I read an article that said that every second a person dies from hunger. This really got me upset when I thought about the food I used to throw away due to various reasons. Was the world hunger problem caused due to the low amount food production? I looked into the depths of the problem and found one thing that really shocked me; food waste. We waste about 22 tons of the food produced every second.

The food waste is one of the major components that covers the land fill and decomposes there to produce greenhouse gases like methane and carbon dioxide.

The cost of the food is rising by leaps and bounds every year. The FAO estimates that the food waste causes an economic loss of about $750 billion dollars per year. In addition, waste of food also causes the waste of the water that was used to prepare it; for every kilogram of beef wasted about 5000 liters of water is wasted which was used to produce it.

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Moreover, 50% of the wasted food occurs during the production, harvest and storage of the food. The other 50% of the food is wasted during its processing, distribution and consumption stages. The developing countries showed more waste in food during the production, harvest and storage of the food while the developed countries wasted more food during the processing, distribution and consumption of food.

The governmental and non-governmental organizations should work together to makes several plans to reduce the food wastage like running campaign to increase awareness in consumers, retailers, farmers and distributers.

This can greatly decrease the food wastage by the personal effort of people. Additionally, provision of tax reduction for the stores that donates remaining food to people in need can also help to reduce the wastage of foods. I chose political science discipline that can provide me a way to implement these ideas on local and national level. The food waste created in the production and harvesting phase can be greatly reduced by the use of proper engineering technology for food handling. For example, the program in which the FAO gave small metal silos to the 18 thousand local farmers in Afghanistan, the loss of the cereals dropped from 18% to less than 2%.

The food distribution, consumption and wastage pattern in different local level can be studied to find the relation between the difference in production and demand which can affect the food wastage and relations can be provided between them to find the optimum food distribution in the area which can result in minimum loss of food. This work requires mathematics and statistics which requires the study of wide range of data to find the relation between the different parameters affecting the food waste in an area. Thus the collaboration of these three disciplines can help to reduce the problem of food waste in different levels of our society and nation creating a utopia in which no person shall ever starve.