The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recently (March 27, 2024) published the global Food Waste Index 2024. This report presented data on the food waste index of different countries as well as its environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions. The findings of this report have created reactions all over the world. As per this report, "a Bangladeshi wastes 82kg of food a year at home," which is much higher than that in many developed countries, including USA, the Netherlands, and Japan. This news is shocking and all mainstream newspapers have published it with high importance.
Waste of food has many implications-- social, cultural, environmental, and behavioural. Waste of food means not only wastage of scarce resources but it also affects the environment. Reducing the global food waste by half by 2030 is one of the top priorities of the SDGs. Again, wastage of food is strictly prohibited in Islam. In a country like Bangladesh, where millions of people still lack access to adequate food and malnutrition has been a serious issue, wasting food here is shameful and unethical.
Given the broad implications of food waste, it is crucial to distinguish between food loss and food waste and carefully consider what constitutes the food waste, how it is measured, how evidence is gathered, and how the data is used to draw conclusions and generalise them so as to represent the entire Bangladesh. In view of this, this write-up briefly looked at the report and on how the authors estimated the food waste in Bangladesh. This highlights the need to measure losses carefully for specific value chains to identify concretely where significant losses occur so as to better understand where to intervene.
Before going to the data, we first need to look at the definition of food waste and how to measure it. Food is any substance from plants and animals, whether raw, semi-processed, or processed, intended for human consumption. However, not all parts of foods are always edible, safe for human consumption, nutritious, or tasty to eat, e.g, jackfruit, pineapple, coconut, mango, banana, and avocado. While the inner parts of these fruits are very tasty and nutritious, the outer parts are not edible nor intended for human consumption. Similarly, in meat, bones, rids, and skin are not edible. Of course, it varies from culture to culture and religion to religion. In some countries animal blood is a good food, in others it is inedible. Generally speaking, food has two parts: 'edible' and 'inedible'. Edible foods are those that can be safely consumed by humans without causing harm, and inedible foods are those that are not fit for human consumption due to hardness, toxicity, or being unpalatable.
To understand food waste, we need to understand the life cycle of food, which passes through a number of phases-- production, processing, packaging, storing, distributing, transporting, marketing, preparation, and consumption. Food moves through this supply chain and reaches the end users either at households or through food delivery services. Using the food value chain, the World Food Programme (WFP) distinguishes between the concepts 'food loss' and 'food waste'. As per WFP, food waste happens when humans discard food that is fit for human consumption, either before or after it spoils. Food waste occurs during the consumption stages of the food supply chain, including retail, household, and food delivery, and food loss occurs at the earlier stages of the food supply, such as production, processing, and distribution of food.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, food waste refers to the discarding or non-food use of safe and nutritious food, while food losses refer to the decrease in quantity and quality throughout the food supply chain, from post-harvest losses to processing, distribution, and marketing. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines food waste as waste that is destined for landfills from homes, businesses (like restaurants and grocery stores), institutions (like school cafeterias), and industrial sources.
After reviewing a large number of literature, Bellimare and others published a paper on food waste in the American Journal of Agriculture Economics and defined the food waste as the amount of food that is intended for human consumption but 'ends up at the landfill'. Food diverted from the food supply chain to a productive non-food use, for example, for feed or biofuel use, retains part of its value and is not considered lost or wasted. From these definitions, it is clear that food waste is the food that, although intended for consumption, is lost, deteriorated, or wasted at the consumption stage at household or food service delivery, and food loss occurs during the post-harvest, processing, distribution, and marketing stages. Food loss and food waste have different causes and different stakeholders are involved in the process. As such, the actions to address these problems are also different.
Let us now delve into the methodology employed to estimate household food waste in Bangladesh. Rather than primary data collection, the researchers relied on the existing studies conducted in Chittagong and Khulna to estimate food waste. The sources pertaining to Khulna, in fact, are not a study but rather a data set of solid waste generation in the Khulna City Corporation, with no reference to the sources of the waste. Regarding the two studies conducted in Chittagong City to estimate household solid waste, very small sample sizes -- 50 households in one study and 70 households in another -- were used. Using the average of these three studies, the researchers have extrapolated household food waste for the entire country of Bangladesh. Relying only on three studies with small sample sizes, none of which was specifically intended to estimate food waste, raises concerns about the validity and reliability of the food waste estimates made by the researchers. It appears that the report mixed up kitchen waste and food waste. Kitchen waste is the non-edible portion of the food we discussed earlier. Thus, it is evident that the narrative of excessive food waste in Bangladeshi households is unfounded; it is a myth, not a fact.
Reducing food waste is important in countries like Bangladesh, where having enough food is a challenge and wasting food is a luxury. The poor does not have such luxury. In fact, what this report referred to as 'food waste' was actually kitchen waste, an inedible portion of food not intended for human consumption. In rural Bangladesh, kitchen waste is frequently reused for animal feed, composting, and other productive uses. These practices not only reduce waste but are also environment friendly and sustainable.
In Bangladesh, food loss at the supply chain is a bigger issue than household waste. Every year, a large amount of food, particularly fruits and vegetables, is lost due to poor infrastructure, low technology, inefficient transportation and marketing facilities, as well as frequent natural disasters. According to the FAO's the State of Food and Agriculture 2019 report, post-harvest losses in fruits and vegetables in Bangladesh range between 20 per cent and 44 per cent. The government should not be misguided by the flawed estimates of the household food waste but prioritise efforts to reduce food loss throughout the supply chain, as well as boost investments in storage facilities, processing and packaging, and transportation for the purpose.
Golam Rasul, PhD is Professor, Department of Economics, International University of Business Agriculture and Technology (IUBAT), Dhaka, Bangladesh.
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