How can we achieve food security if one-third of the food produced globally is wasted?
The first part of this article (here) gave a brief overview of the global status of food waste and proffered smart individual waste reduction practices such as to avoid overfeeding; making a shopping list before heading to the supermarket; checking the refrigerator before shopping to avoid buying what you already have and so on. These simple yet effective practices are important as it is often said that the best means to curb waste would be to not produce it at all.
Notwithstanding, other approaches can be adopted to manage food waste. These include: reuse or recycle (or up-cycle as it is sometimes called) the waste produced.
Reuse: This involves the use of food in its original form for other purposes such as redistribution to regions of inadequacy; as animal feed and as a good source of compost for home gardening. Basically, reusing food waste involves re-purposing without technological transformation to serve as raw material for other industries as is the case with recycling.
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Recycle: Despite being one of the most advocated approaches in food waste management, it has been stated previously that recycling is less sustainable in comparison with reuse of food waste, seeing as recycling can also produce waste and cause pollution in the treatment process. In spite of this line of thought, recycling of food waste is a fast-rising, profitable aspect of the agricultural value chain and is known to be an effective means of food waste management. This involves the transformation of avoidable (bread, rice, vegetables) and unavoidable (yam peels, eggshells, snail shells, orange peels) food waste into reusable forms like animal feed, organic fertilizers high in Calcium such as fertilizers produced from snail and eggshells, generation of sustainable and renewable energy as is in the case of biogas plant and so much more.
The environmental, social and economic impacts of food waste as stated in the last article cannot be overemphasized, thus, in aligning with the thoughts of Jasmine Crowe in a TedTalk on “what we’re getting wrong in the fight to end hunger” that we need to waste less to feed more and reduce the number of persons who are food insecure across the globe. It is imperative for governments and private individuals to intensify efforts especially in developing regions of the world like the sub-Saharan Africa where food is not only wasted as a result of poor infrastructural development but as a result of little-to-no awareness on waste management as well.
Farmers within this region are most affected as they painstakingly produce surplus with the hope of making huge profits but are often left disappointed as large quantities of these produces are left to waste owing to the inability to store, process or access existing markets outside their communities. Therefore, a good place to start would be to intensify sensitization of rural farmers who bear the most grunt of food waste. In the absence of immediate government infrastructural intervention programmes, they can be taught local recycling methods that would not only benefit the environment but also serve as another source of income thus, improving their livelihoods and contributing to the achievement of food and nutrition security.
Need I say that the gateway to achieving food security might just be to adopt effective means of redistributing food currently produced across the globe from regions of surplus to regions of the deficit, rather than focus on intensifying food production; but we just might never know if we fail to collectively combat food waste.
Author:
Ogbole Esther.
''As an agricultural enthusiast, I have long had a passion for contributing my quota to the growth and development of the Nigeria agricultural sector and this birthed an interest in research to see what and how precisely agricultural strategies are implemented in developed economies of the world and how they can be adapted to suit the Nigerian scenario''.
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