In today's world, where so many wake up in poverty and go to sleep hungry, each of us should ask: "how can I change this?" It is a sin to waste food while others do not have enough to eat. Every year the food waste in America alone can feed over 50 million people per year. Another example: if a farmer grows 100,000 pounds of tomatoes, usually about half of them (50,000 lbs) must be thrown away. This is because if a tomato is slightly misshapen, discolored, too small (or too big), or blemished in any way, it will not meet the consumer demand for a "perfect" tomato and will therefore be rejected.
This is true for many fruit and vegetable crops. To prevent trucks of produce from being rejected, crops are "culled" (hand sorted) after they are picked. About half goes into the truck on its way to the store. The other half goes into the truck going to the dump, or destined to be plowed under and sprayed with insecticide. The food being thrown away is not rotten or bad in any way.
This news come hot on the heels of the UN food summit in Rome which ended in failure as delegates bungle the final declaration. As I reported on the the Rome conference for the last three days, here here and here, I personally did not have much hope that anything of substance would be accomplished in three short days, marred by the presence of two tyrants, Mugabe & Ahmadinejad who both managed to lay all ills at the foot of the western world's door.
The UN's food crisis summit lurched to a messy end in Rome yesterday as brave hopes failed to translate into convincing commitments to tackle the soaring threat of world hunger. A final declaration was only agreed after hours of bickering over the language. And the final text failed to disguise dramatic differences over the cause of price inflation and its cure.
Nevertheless, it is America which has once again been subject to the biggest criticism at the Rome summit – this time for its policy of vast ethanol subsidies, with its effect of turning about a quarter of what was its corn production into fuel for cars, blindly promoted by George W Bush when he was made to realize that his Iraq war had failed in its objective of increasing the supply of "friendly" oil from the Middle East. Someone ought to send a memo to the future President, Barack Obama, to ensure that this absurdity would end on his watch.
Although the World Food Program has been given an additional $3bn of emergency food aid, and the Islamic Development Bank has promised to deliver $1.5bn to help farmers in some of the poorest countries increase production, I find that since the conference was informed that up to $30bn a year in aid pledges (UN's Ban Ki Moon figure) would be necessary to alleviate the developing world's hunger, these sums are hardly cause for great celebration.
The prevalent view to solve the global food price emergency is to invest heavily in agricultural production in poor countries through UN agencies, eliminate rich world farm subsidies and impose a moratorium on recently established bio-fuel programs. To enable these policies we need strong leadership, and political will, which frankly, is lacking worldwide.