India's Food Wastage

Imagine a land mass greater than China. Now imagine that land is only used to produce food. Then suppose all the crops and produce from those 2.5bn acres are not eaten and left to rot. Imagine all of that – and you get an idea of the amount of food the world wastes every year.  It is almost a third of the world's. In terms of weight, it adds up to around 1.3bn tonnes. The case for action becomes even stronger when we consider that 1 in 9 people are malnourished worldwide.  Better processing and recycling can feed 11 per cent of the world’s population.

India produces enough food to meet the needs of its entire population, and has at its disposal arable land that has the potential to produce food surplus for export. Yet, it is unable to feed millions of its people, especially women and children. Despite the fact that every twelfth Indian has to sleep on an empty stomach, the country wastes food worth Rs 58,000 crores in a year, about seven percent of its total food production.  It is lost during harvest, or on the journey from farm to markets- in essence in production, processing, retailing and consumption Lack of storage facilities is the major reason for crops perishing after harvest. Around one percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) gets shaved off annually in the form of food waste. 

india is the second-largest producer of vegetables and fruits, but about 25-30 percent of it is wasted due to inadequate logistical support, lack of refrigerated storage, supply chain bottlenecks, poor transport and underdeveloped marketing channels. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) puts this figure at around 40 percent, worth around $8.3 billion. Twenty-one million metric tonnes of wheat, which is almost equal to Australia’s annual production, rots each year due to improper storage. According to the Associated Chambers of Commerce, the country experiences a post-harvest loss of Rs 2 lakh crores annually. Less than 4 percent of India’s fresh produce is transported by cold-chains, compared to more than 90 percent in the UK. It is estimated that one million tonnes of onions vanish on their way from farms to markets, as do 2.2 million tonnes of tomatoes. Tomatoes get squished if they are packed into jute sacks. Overall, five million eggs crack or go bad due to lack of cold storage. Only 10 percent of the perishable produce has access to cold storage facilities in India. These are mostly used for potatoes to meet India’s robust demand for chips. The Indian Institute of Management  study estimates that India needs storage facilities for another 370 million metric tonnes of perishable produce. The cost of delivering energy to remote, rural regions for running storage facilities is also quite steep and this means that even when storage facilities are built, they may not be able to function.

Just three states of India—Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana—grow most of India’s grains and the food has to be transported to far-flung areas.  If there are no proper roads linking fields to markets, farmers cannot easily sell their surplus produce, which may then spoil before it can be eaten. Improving road and rail capacity enables farmers to reach buyers and likewise, fertilisers and other agricultural inputs to reach farmers.

The World Bank recently stated that nearly 60 percent of the country’s food subsidies do not reach the poor; they are syphoned off by the middlemen. Reforming the faltering public distribution system which mainly supplies subsidised grain to the poor and modernizing other areas, such as computerization of outlets and satellite control over the movement of transport vehicles can go a long way in plugging the leakages. Every year, the government purchases millions of tonnes of grain from the farmers to ensure that they get a good price for their produce, for numerous food subsidy programmes and to maintain an emergency buffer. The cruel truth, however, is that most of the produce is left out in the open, vulnerable to rain and attacks by rodents or stored in makeshift spaces, covered by tarpaulin sheets, thus increasing the chances of spoilage.The Food Corporation of India (FCI) has neither a warehouse capacity nor the manpower to manage this humongous stockpile of foodgrains.

Added to the wastage of food, there is a depletion of precious resources involved in its production. According to the United Nations, India is estimated to use more than 230 cubic kilometres of fresh water annually, for producing food items that will be ultimately wasted. To put this into context, this amount of water is enough to provide drinking water to 100 million people every year. Besides this, nearly 300 million barrels of oil used in the process are also ultimately wasted.

 India ranks 100th among 119 countries in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) 2017, where it has consistently ranked poorly. Indeed, the world’s zero-hunger goal appears to be slipping further into the future rather than getting ever closer.

https://countercurrents.org/2018/10/13/wasting-food-in-a-hungry-world-world-food-day-16-october/