More than one billion metric tons of food is either lost of wasted annually where one in nine people are still undernourished.
Speakers at a virtual seminar on ‘food loss and the waste in the context of Bangladesh’, made the observations on Tuesday.
They suggested taking effective measures to reduce food losses and waste in the backdrop of the reality that the number of people affected by hunger has been slowly on the rise since 2014, and tons of food are lost or wasted every day.
The seminar was organized by Press Institute of Bangladesh (PIB) with support and technical assistance from Food and Agriculture Organization of Bangladesh (FAO) on Tuesday. This was the 3rd webinar among a series of 5 webinars on discussing different aspects of food and nutrition security issues.
Agapi Harutiunyan, Senior SDG Specialist (Food Loss and Waste) Meeting the Undernutrition Challenge (MUCH), FAO, delivered a presentation on the Introduction to Food Loss and Waste in the Context of Food and Nutrition Security at the webinar.
In her presentation she mentioned that the percentage of food lost after harvesting and during transport, storage and processing stood is 13.8 per cent globally, amounting to 400-billion-dollar worth of food in a year while the percentage of food waste at the retail and consumption stage is yet to be estimated.
“When food is lost or wasted, all the resources that were used to produce this food, including water, land, energy, labour and capital is also wasted,” Agapi also mentioned in her presentation.
Another presentation was delivered by Professor Md Kamrul Hasan of Department of Horticulture, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, on Food loss and waste in Bangladesh.
Professor Kamrul in his presentation mentioned that Bangladesh was one of the top ten rice and tropical fruits producing countries. In terms of the production of tropical fruits it stood 6th while it stood 4th in rice production among the rice countries of the world.
Professor Kamrul mentioned that the latest data on food loss and waste in Bangladesh was not available and a research project was being carried out to know the estimate. However, research carried out in 2010 found that post-harvest losses of food varies from 22-44 per cent in different food production in Bangladesh, amounting to taka 3442 crore. He also mentioned that in South Asia food loss is mostly prevalent near production, handling and storage, and less at the consumption level. On the other hand, food loss is more prevalent at the retail and consumption level in the developed countries.
Professor Kamrul recommended that Bangladesh should develop infrastructures which include electricity generation, storage system, packaging system, waste recycling system, modern transportation systems to reduce the food losses and wastes. He also recommended to create awareness among common people to reduce food waste at household, catering and restaurants.
Dr. Mosammat Nazmanara Khanum, Secretary, Ministry of Food, delivered speech as the Chief Guest while Robert Simpson, FAO representative in Bangladesh and also representative, European Union Bangladesh and Assunta Testa, Program Manager, Food and Nutrition Security, EU Delegation to Bangladesh, delivered opening remarks at the webinar as special guests.
Naoki Minamiguchi, Chief Technical Adviser, Meeting the Undernutrition Challenge (MUCH) Project, FAO, delivered the vote of thanks with Zafar Wazed, Director General, Press Institute Bangladesh, in the chair.
Dr. Nazmanara Khanum in her speech as the chief guest said that a considerable amount of food was lost during harvesting, processing, transporting and marketing. Additional losses occurred at the retail and consumer level.
She remarked that food losses and wastes have negative economic consequences for the stakeholders in the food chain and increase the cost for consumers. Referring to the findings of a study, she mentioned that food losses and wastes was not a problem of developing countries but also a problem of developed countries.
