Box 8-C---Post-Harvest Food Losses and Waste

From the moment of harvest to the time food reaches the consumer's mouth, food losses and waste occur, these range from deterioration in food quality to consumption by rodents or disposal as household garbage. Worldwide losses and wastes appear to be substantial. For example, the Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that about 5 to 16 million metric tons of fish are caught and subsequently discarded by fishing vessels each year, this represents 6 to 20 percent of the amount that is retained (115). Additionally, about 10 percent of fresh fish supplies may be lost because of post-harvest problems such as inadequate refrigeration. A study in the early 1980s suggested that individual American households may waste 6 to 25 percent, or more, of their food--perhaps $30 billion of food (34). Despite these and other examples, though, the magnitude of total losses and wastes remains very poorly defined at all levels, from the local to the global scale.

In industrialized countries, post-harvest food losses up to and including the storage, processing, and packaging steps (see figure 8-1) were relatively minor in the 1970s (1 to 2 percent) compared to developing countries, where such losses totaled at least 10 percent and often were higher (25a). However, for secondary food processing, marketing, and consumption, the situation is reversed. In industrialized countries, large amounts of food from eating establishments outside the home (e.g., restaurants, cafeterias, airlines, carry-out fast food outlets) are wasted on the plate and generally are discarded as garbage. In developing countries little food is wasted in this manner.

Cutting such losses and wastes offers an opportunity to increase food supplies without expanding food production. This would help alleviate pressures on land crops and on fisheries, thereby facilitating efforts to slow land transformations, and it also could help reduce the use of commercial fertilizers and fossil fuel inputs. Largely motivated by a desire to improve diets around the world, a variety of national and international organizations have called for efforts to reduce post-harvest losses and wastes (110, 117).

Serious obstacles impede progress in reducing losses, however. Even where losses can be quantified, solutions may not be cheap or easy. Where losses and wastes are large and they can be reduced in a cost-effective manner, a variety of opportunities are available. These range from encouraging education, training, and alternative technologies, to supporting economic and social changes and financing a broad spectrum of local, national, and international institutions (69, 75)

SOURCE: Office of Technology Assessment, 1991.