'Food losses and waste symbolic of system inefficiencies'

India's renowned geneticist M S Swaminathan today said food losses and waste are symbolic of the inefficiencies of food systems, as the FAO reported around 536 million people were deprived of nutrition in Asia-Pacific due to post-harvest food losses.
To a great extent, food losses and waste are symbolic of the inefficiencies of food systems and this explains "why food losses and waste are becoming so central to discussions on both food security and sustainable development," Swaminathan said.
"Food waste is also a waste of natural resources like land and water," Swaminathan, father of India's first Green Revolution, which boosted crop yields, said.

He was speaking at a two-day High Level Multi Stakeholder Consultation on Food losses and Food waste in Asia and the Pacific held here in collaboration with the Asian Institute of Technology and other partners.
UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) denounced the huge amount of food that goes to waste and announced a new initiative aimed at stopping post-harvest food losses and market-to-consumer food waste.
"The Save Food Asia-Pacific Campaign seeks to raise awareness about the high levels of food losses, particularly post-harvest losses, and the growing problem of food waste in the region," FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Asia and the Pacific, Hiroyuki Konuma, said.

"FAO estimates that if the food wasted or lost globally could be reduced by just one quarter, this would be sufficient to feed the 870 million people suffering from chronic hunger in the world," he said.

More than 130 participants from 20 countries attended the Consultation. The Consultation will study ways to reduce food loss and waste and is expected to issue a communique outlining actions that can save food from farm to table.
According to Konuma, "The world produces more or less sufficient food to meet the demand of its current population of 7 billion. However, 12.5 per cent of the global population, or 868 million people, equivalent to one in eight people, go hungry every day.

"In 2012, the Asia-Pacific region was home to 536 million hungry people, or 62 per cent of the world's undernourished."
The region benefitted from rapid economic growth in the first decade of the 21st century. But successful economic growth did not alleviate hunger and poverty, because the benefits of economic growth were unevenly distributed that widened income gap in many countries in the region, he said.
According to statistics from the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, an estimated 653 million people across the region, lived below the national poverty line in 2010.