Recycling Food Waste to Fight World Hunger

Following its annual meeting held in Nairobi on February 17, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) published its latest report on the global food situation. According to the document, meeting foreseeable growing food needs does not entail boosting food production worldwide, it just takes recycling the millions of tons of food that are wasted every year in the human-managed food chain.

In fact, nearly half of the global food production is currently wasted due to pandemic plant diseases, inadequate warehousing facilities in many Southern nations, transportation inefficiencies, non-standard products as well as wasteful consumer habits in wealthy countries.

Consequently, the UNEP calls for reassigning this “waste” to cattle feeding or using it for bio-fuels production. By freeing a third of the global grain production currently used in livestock feed and reallocating it to human consumption, these practices would be beneficial and ease demands on productive lands.

A testimonial to the fact that global food is now more than ever at the core of international issues, the UNEP concept is heartening for the future. It draws attention to the fact that the current situation, no matter how alarming, is not an unavoidable reality. Solutions to fight world hunger do exist and are far from being out of reach.