Carolina Gomez Mena
La Jornada newspaper
Thursday, November 18, 2021, p. twenty-one
Among 8 and 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions originate from food losses and waste
and a study by FAO (2019) positioned food waste as the second emitter of greenhouse gases in food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean; a little more than 966 thousand kilotonnes of carbon equivalent, said Julio Berdegué, deputy director general of the organization.
At the Second Summit on Food Loss and Waste Reduction in Latin America and the Caribbean, experts warned that given the increase in food insecurity caused by Covid-19, it is urgent to establish policies to reduce these losses.
Berdegué indicated that Latin America and the Caribbean loses 11.6 percent of food, and grains, fruits, vegetables and fish are the food groups with the highest loss rates from the field to the front door of retail markets
.
This amount of loss and waste is equivalent to “a quarter of the use of fresh water for agriculture. This amount of food requires an area of land that is greater than the size of China to produce.
FAO estimates the economic costs of food loss and waste at $ 1 billion per year, and the environmental costs are much higher, $ 700 billion per year and the social costs $ 900 billion. While this is happening, 60 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer from hunger
.
Daniela Godoy, chief food policy officer at FAO Latin America and the Caribbean, said that the Covid increased hunger in the region. Last year 60 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean suffered from hunger, 14 million more than in 2019
.
He added that 267 million people in the region, that is about 41 percent of the population was moderately and severely food insecure in 2020, and 14 percent were severely food insecure
.
The global prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity has been growing slowly since 2014, and in Latin America and the Caribbean it increased nine percentage points between 2019 and 2020
.
At the meeting organized by the IDB, FAO and Pnuma and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries of the Argentine government, it was stated that 17 percent of the food available at the consumer level is wasted. Martina Otto, head of the Cities and Lifestyles Unit of UNEP, explained that in the year before the pandemic 913 million tons of food sold to homes, retailers, restaurants and other food services were wasted
.
In general, throughout the chain a third of the food is wasted in the world, which costs the global economy almost a trillion dollars a year, and this situation exacerbates poverty in households.
