08 Feb 2013
A gala dinner in Kenya will highlight the millons of tons of food wasted all over the world. All the food on the menu will have been thrown away
In 10 days’ time, 500 ministers, top bureaucrats, UN officials, pressure group leaders and associated hangers-on will sit down to a banquet in Nairobi. Nothing unusual about that, you may say. It’s par for the course at international conferences, the sort of thing that gets some on the Right grumbling about waste, and some on the Left mumbling about taking food from the mouths of the poor.
But this one will be different. Every scrap served at the gala dinner at the Global Ministerial Environment Forum in the Kenyan capital will have been thrown away, part of the mountain range of edible food that goes to waste worldwide. And it will mark the moment that a campaign to reduce it, started by a young Briton, goes global.
The extent of the waste, which will be starkly set out in statistics on the diners’ napkins, is shaming. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which is hosting the meeting, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) conservatively estimate that a third of all the food produced worldwide each year – worth more than $1 trillion – is never eaten. And this when hundreds of millions already cannot get enough and the world’s population is expected to swell by another two billion in less than three decades.
The waste also uses up other scarce resources. Some 500 million hectares of arable land – an area larger than the Indian subcontinent – grows unconsumed food. So forests are cut down and vital wetlands drained to provide land that should not be used. And there is also a massive waste of water, energy and fertiliser.
Yet buried in the scandal lies an opportunity. Cutting food waste by just a quarter, as the delegates’ napkins will remind them, would release enough – in theory – to feed all the world’s 870 million desperately hungry people. Destruction of wild places could be greatly reduced, the release of greenhouse gases curbed and water conserved.
That would demand changes in rich and poor countries alike. In developed nations, most waste occurs because producers, retailers and consumers throw out food that is still fit for consumption. A third of what is grown never reaches the market – largely because it fails to meet cosmetic standards demanded by supermarkets – while consumers throw out 222 million tons of food a year, almost as much as sub-Saharan Africa produces.
Britain is one of the most wasteful countries: the average family discards food worth £480 a year. One way or another, by some calculations, up to two thirds of the vegetables grown in Britain go uneaten.
Of course, cutting back on waste in rich countries does not mean that the liberated food ends up in the stomachs of the poor in developing ones. But by reducing demand, it can bring down prices, enabling needy people to buy more.
In developing countries, 95 per cent of the waste occurs before the food is sold, eaten by pets on the farm or rotting in markets, through poor storage and distribution. In India, 21 million tons of wheat – equivalent to Australia’s entire production – perishes in this way annually, while enough food is lost in Africa to feed 300 million people.
Now, at last, the world is beginning to address the issue. Much of this is down to Tristram Stuart, who, when feeding pigs at 15, realised how much good food went into their troughs. Over the last two decades he has studied the issues, examined bins behind supermarkets, written a book and organised a feeding of 5,000 people on waste food in Trafalgar Square in 2009.
He is also behind the Nairobi dinner, which will help launch a global campaign by UNEP and the FAO. And already things are happening. Partly inspired by Stuart, Britain has been a pioneer, with successive governments launching anti-waste pushes. Waste in homes fell by 17 per cent between 2007 and 2010, he says, while sales of odd-shaped fruit and veg rose by 300,000 tons last year.
France has also initiated a campaign. South Korea has introduced swipe-card bins, charging households for food they throw out. And in China, the presumptive new president, Xi Jinping, has cracked down on banquets and launched a “Clear the Plate” drive, decreeing: “These habits of waste must be stopped immediately!”
“I don’t know exactly how it works,” says Stuart, “but it does. People are amazed – and shocked – by the problem, and want to help. It is a relief in many ways that we can enhance the lives of the world’s hungry and reduce pressure on land by doing things as easy as buying only the food we eat, and eating whatever we buy.”
Why is the Prime Minister’s green speech under wraps?
David Cameron this week made his greenest speech as Prime Minister – going further even than his pledge to run the “greenest government ever”, shortly after taking power. But his officials don’t want you to read it, refusing to post it alongside his other speeches on the Downing Street website.
Which is a shame, since what he said – opening a conference at the Royal Society on Monday – deserves study. He directly took on George Osborne and other renewable energy sceptics in his government, insisting “to those who say we just can’t afford to prioritise green energy right now, my view is that we can’t afford not to”, and adding “the economies in Europe that will prosper are those that are the greenest and the most energy efficient”.
Downing Street struggles to explain why it is keeping it under wraps. It protests the PM was just making “talking points, not a speech” (even though he was reading a text) and that it does not put such “opening remarks” online (although it did precisely that for a similar introduction to an energy conference last April).
Makes you wonder who is running the show.
SOS: This 'living fossil’ is in danger of dying out
Here’s a new cause. “Save the hellbender” may not have quite the appeal of similar campaigns for the whale or tiger, but US conservationists are fired up about an endangered salamander described as “so ugly, it’s beautiful”.
A 2ft-long “living fossil” – whose flattened body has changed little in 160 million years – the Ozark hellbender is being championed by the Tucson-based Centre for Biological Diversity, which is taking two government agencies to court for failing to protect it properly in Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest.
While 70 years ago – as one collector noted – you could “find a specimen under almost every suitable rock” around the fast‑flowing waters it frequents, now fewer than 600 remain, as pollution, logging and tourism have taken their toll.
Known locally as a “devil dog”, “mud devil” or “snot otter”, it is thought to have got its name because settlers believed it was a creature of the infernal regions, to which it was bent on returning. That’s something that would no doubt have appealed to Twain who, after all, famously advised going “to heaven for the climate, hell for the company”.
