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Food Wastage v/s Poor People

Submitted To: Mrs.Alka Mehta Submitted by: Ghanshyam

Faculty-English B.A.LL.B (Hons.) Student
Semester-1,Sec-B,Roll-59

Submitted On: 31Aug 2017

Hidayatullah National Law University

Raipur, C.G.
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Declaration
I hereby declare that this research work titled ‘Food Wastage v/s Poor People’ is my own work

and represents my own ideas and were others’ ideas or words have been included, I have

adequately cited and referenced the original sources. I also declare that I have adhered to all

principles of academic honesty and integrity and have not misrepresented or fabricated or

falsified any idea/data/fact/source in my submission.

Ghanshyam Meena
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Acknowledgement
I feel highly elated to work on the topic “Food Wastage v/s Poor People”.

No creation in this world is a sole effort, nor is this work of mine. The practical realization of
this project has obligated the assistance of many persons. First of all I would like to thank my
faculty teacher Mrs. Alka Mehta Maa’m for her invaluable suggestions and guidance. It would
not have been possible for me to frame this project of mine without her support.

I would like to thank my family and friends without whose support and encouragement, this
project would not have been a reality.

I take this opportunity to also thank the University and the Vice Chancellor for providing
extensive database resources in the Library and through Internet. Some typing errors might have
crept in, which are deeply regretted. I would be grateful to receive comments and suggestions to
further improve this project report.

Ghanshyam Meena

Semester I
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Research Methodology

This project work is descriptive and analytical in approach. It is largely based on the analysis of
articles and references based on the Technology and Law. The texts that were used for project
include articles, research paper and news given in various websites as well as online journals
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Table of Contents

 Acknowledgement..................................................................................
 Research Methodology...........................................................................
 Introduction................................................................................................1
 Objectives………………………………………………………….……..2
 Food Wastage around the World………………………………………....3
 Poverty around the World………………………………………………..5
 Food as A Basic Need for Poor People……………………………….….8
 Awareness Of food Wastage……………………………………………10
 Food Wastage and Our Environment……………………………………13
 Conclusion……………………………………………………………….15
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Introduction
The reduction of food waste is seen as a key lever for achieving global food security, freeing up
finite resources for other uses, diminishing environmental risks, and avoiding financial losses.
Food loss or Food waste is food that is lost during any of the four stages of the food supply
chain: growers, processors, retailers, and consumers. The causes of food waste or loss are
numerous, and occur at the stages of production, processing, retailing and consumption. Global
food loss and waste amounts to between one-third and one-half] of all food produced. It is also a
one of the biggest problem which is faces by today’s world. The amounts of food waste are
unknown, but are likely to be insignificant by comparison, due to the limited stages at which
waste can occur, and given that food is grown for projected need as opposed to a global
marketplace demand. A 2013 report from the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME)
likewise estimated that 30–50% or 1.2–2 billion tons of all food produced remains uneaten. In
low-income countries, most loss occurs during production, while in developed countries much
food – about 100 kilograms (220 lb) per person per year – is wasted at the consumption stage.
Society labels people who are below the poverty line collectively as, and almost
condescendingly, as the "poor" people. The idea of being poor or impoverished has a more
formal definition that is not solely based on physical appearances. In fact, to understand it, we
must first distinguish between its two possible interpretations - the first of which being the
inability to purchase necessities (known as absolute poverty), and being poor due to a
comparatively lower net value against another individual without necessarily being below the
poverty line (known as relative poverty). According to the U.N., 842 million people suffer from
the effects of hunger globally, and using the UNEP and WRI’s estimates, the one-third of the
world’s food wasted could equal up to 1,520 calories for each hungry person in developing
countries where malnourishment is widespread.
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Objectives
Determine the behavior of the actors involved in the food industry about the generation and
management of food waste. Define the needs of the sector.

 Develop an efficient and sustainable model for the management and valorization of
waste from the food industry as an alternative to disposal in landfill.

 Contribute to the fight against climate change and the reduction of CO2 emissions.

 Understand the behaviors, attitudes, and knowledge of food waste at the consumer level

 Craft an effective public awareness campaign to inform the public and help consumers to
reduce their food waste

 To work with people and communities experiencing poverty to empower them to address
poverty

 To work with organizations to build a strong anti-poverty network in Scotland

 To support the development of policies which promote social justice and combat poverty
 To raise awareness about poverty and encourage debate about solutions.
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Chapter- 1
Food Wastage around the World
Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year —
approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted. This includes 45% of all fruit and
vegetables, 35% of fish and seafood, 30% of cereals, 20% of dairy products and 20% of
meat. Food losses and waste amounts to roughly US$ 680 billion in industrialized countries and
US$ 310 billion in developing countries.

There is also a moral imperative involved in resolving this issue as the President of the World
Bank Group Jim Yong Kim points out, “Millions of people around the world go to bed hungry
every night and yet millions of tons of food end up in trash cans or spoiled on the way to market.
We have to tackle this problem in every country in order to improve food security and to end
poverty.” Estimates of global food waste have been as high as 30 or 50 per cent. Acc. To a study
Food waste generates 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases. Acc. to study of Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) most of this wastage occurs in the
developed world; per capita food waste by consumers (not including the production process) in
Europe and North America is around 95-115kg per year, compared to just 6-11kg in sub-Saharan
Africa and South/South-East Asia. Large amounts of food is still lost during the production
process in developing countries, however, due to lack of infrastructure and poor equipment.
Wastage at the consumption stage in these countries, meanwhile, is drastically less than
developed nations, Not only developed country the industrialized country also play a major role
in food wastage. In industrialized countries, food waste is typically caused by consumers buying
too much food and being too concerned with the food’s appearance. The latest figures from
WRAP, UK households waste £13 billion worth of food every year. Which if prevented, would
have the environmental benefit of taking one in four cars off the road. Food loss and waste also
has a significant impact on the environment. The carbon footprint of wasted food is estimated at
3.3 gigatonnes. In fact, if food waste were a country, it would rank behind only the US and China
for greenhouse gas emissions. The production of wasted food also uses around 1.4 billion
hectares of land – 28% of the world’s agricultural area. A huge amount of surface or
groundwater – known as “blue water” – is also lost. The food waste issue is currently high on the
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political agenda. In its roadmap for a resource efficient Europe, the European Commission has
set a target to halve the disposal of edible food by 2020. Although the assessment of global food
losses along the supply chain is based on highly uncertain data, there is no doubt that
considerable quantities are at stake. Around 4600 kilocalories of food are harvested per day for
every person on the planet; only around 2000 are eaten. Since the launch of our wonky
vegetables campaign, vegetables that would have been wasted in the past have become the
fastest growing sector of the fresh produce market. From 2012-13 the relaxation of cosmetic
standards saved 300,000 tonnes of produce from being wasted on UK farms. Many are also
fearful of the effect the growing population will have on the availability of food after the Pew
Research Center revealed that 9.6 billion people are expected to populate the world in 2050,
emphasizing the importance of future food security.
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Chapter-2
Poverty around the World
Poverty is general scarcity or the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions
or money or Poverty means not having enough money for basic needs such
as food, water, shelter, or toilets. Whereas according to Webster's Third New International
Dictionary, poverty is "lack of money or material possessions poor." Two-thirds of the world's
population fits this definition. Many people in different countries live in poverty, especially
in developing areas of Africa, Latin America and some parts Asia. It is a multifaceted concept,
which includes social, economic, and political elements. Relative poverty occurs when people in
a country do not enjoy a certain minimum level of living standards as compared to the rest of the
population and so would vary from country to country, sometimes within the same
country.Billions of people around the world live in poverty. The economy shuns them. The
environment attacks them. They suffer physically, emotionally and spiritually. In the United
States, the official poverty rate for 2012 stood at 15 percent based on the national poverty line
which is equivalent to around $16 per person per day.1 Of the 46.5 million Americans living in
poverty, 20.4 million live under half the poverty line. The World Bank is the main source for
global information on extreme poverty today and it sets the International Poverty Line. The
poverty line was revised in 2015—since then, a person is considered to be in extreme poverty if
he or she lives on less than 1.90 international dollars (int.-$) per day. This poverty measurement
is based on the monetary value of a person’s consumption. Income measures, on the other hand,
are only used for countries in which reliable consumption measures are not available. It is
important to note that the International Poverty Line is extremely low. Indeed, ‘extreme poverty’
is an adequate term for those living under this low threshold. Focusing on extreme poverty is
important precisely because it captures those most in need. However, it is also important to point
out that living conditions well above the International Poverty Line can still be characterized by
poverty and hardship. In the developed world there, many people are seen as the working poor.
They have a job, but do not earn enough money for basic things such as food and a home. In
most developed countries, people without jobs receive money from the government, but this is
often less than they need for a comfortable life. Around the world, the poor carry the burden of
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poverty on their heads and on their backs. A key difficulty in measuring global poverty is that
price levels are very different in different countries. For this reason, it is not sufficient to simply
convert the consumption levels of people in different countries by the market exchange rate; it is
additionally necessary to adjust for cross-country differences in purchasing power. if we talks
about our past then During the first half of the last century, the growth of the world population
caused the absolute number of poor people in the world to increase, even though the share of
people in poverty was going down. After around 1970, the decrease in poverty rates became so
steep that the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty started falling as well. This
trend of decreasing poverty—both in absolute numbers and as a share of the world population—
has been a constant during the last three decades. As we can see, in 1820 there were just fewer
than 1.1 billion people in the world, of which more than 1 billion lived in extreme poverty. Over
the next 150 years, the decline of poverty was not fast enough to offset the very rapid rise of the
world population. There were 2.2 billion people living in extreme poverty in 1970, and there
were 705 million people living in extreme poverty in 2015. The number of extremely poor
people in the world is 3 times lower than in 1970. In 1990, there were 2 billion people living in
extreme poverty. With a reduction to 705 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day
in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 137,000 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.
The most straightforward way to measure poverty is to set a poverty line and count the number
of people living with incomes or consumption levels below that poverty line and divide the
number of poor people by the entire population. This is the poverty headcount ratio. The most
common way to measure the intensity of poverty is to calculate the amount of money required by
a poor person to just reach the poverty line.

There is two types of poverty absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty is measured
relative to a fixed standard of living. Absolute poverty measures are often used to compare
poverty between countries and then they are not just held constant over time, but also across
countries. The International Poverty Line is the best known poverty line for measuring absolute
poverty globally. Some countries also use absolute poverty measures on a national level. These
measures are anchored so that comparisons relative to a minimum consumption or income level
over time are possible. Relative Poverty, on the other hand, is measured relative to living
standards in a particular society, and varies both across time and between societies. The idea
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behind measuring poverty in relative terms is that the degree of deprivation depends on the
relevant reference group; hence, people are typically considered poor by this standard if they
have less income and opportunities than other individuals living in the same society.

For ending poverty the World Bank Group works to end poverty in a number of ways- from
funding projects that can have transformational impacts on communities, to collecting and
analyzing the critical data and evidence needed to target these programs to reach the poorest and
most vulnerable, to helping governments create more inclusive, effective policies that can benefit
entire populations and lay the groundwork for prosperity for future generations.
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Chapter-3
Food as a Basic Need for Poor People
Being able to meet basic needs like safe housing, adequate food, and healthcare enables
individuals and families to move from day-to-day existence toward the capacity to look to the
future. First of all are we known that what is basic need Basic needs refer to those things that are
necessary to sustain life? It is the minimum requirements of a community for a decent standard
of life. Basic needs consists of adequate food, shelter, and clothing plus some household
equipment and furniture. They also include essential services provided by and for the
community-at-large such as safe drinking water, sanitation, health and education. The right to
food ensures peoples' right to access adequate food sources and feed them in dignity. It protects
all humans from hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. Today, 106 countries recognize the
right to food through either constitutional agreements or the approval of various international
treaties that protect the right to food. The fact that around 800 million people are literally
starving to death in a world of plenty is a level of human injustice which beggars belief. Women
and children are the worst affected. Woman, who in many countries are not allowed to own land,
make up 60% of the global total; if they were given equal access to resources the World Food
Programmed (WFP) estimates that “the number of hungry in the world could be reduced by up to
150 million people.” The causes of hunger are not complicated. While the rich indulge to excess,
and fill to overflowing, people are allowed to die of hunger-related illnesses simply because they
don’t have enough money to buy food. This needless human destruction is not simply unjust, it is
atrociously immoral and should fill us all with shame. As a wise man has said, “my brothers how
can you watch these people die before your eyes and call yourselves men.

According to UNICEF Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five
– 3.1 million children each year, 90% of whom are the victims of long-term malnourishment –
rather than emergency famine. And for those who survive early childhood, hunger leaves a
lifelong legacy of cognitive and physical impairment. Although the vast majority (98%) of
those living with acute food insecurity are found in ‘developing’ – i.e. poor, countries. Sub-
Saharan Africa (where 25% of children are malnourished) accounts for 214 million people
living with food insecurity, but the greatest concentration of starving human beings (525
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million), according to figures from The Hunger Project, lives in Asia. Inevitably, given its
population (1.3 billion), the largest proportion is in India (over 200 million), where the causes
of hunger are pretty much the same as everywhere else in the world: High levels of poverty,
inequality, rising food costs, inflation and poor governance. We could add to this list: lack of
sharing, or distribution of foodstuffs to those in need, and crucially ending food waste.
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Chapter-4
Awareness for Food Wastage
According to different sources, 25 to 40% of food products are wasted in the world. There is
something that we still don’t see: food wasted by restaurants, shops or industries. There is also
something we can see: food wasted by ourselves. This is the range focus of communities,
through the management of wasted products of catering firms. Food makes up a huge proportion
waste and that's why reducing your food waste is one of the single biggest things you can do to
help the environment. Food prices are also rising, and projects have shown that by focusing on
food, residents can save a huge amount of money. The message that food waste matters has been
slowly percolating into public perception. Food waste is openly acknowledged not as an
externality but a key concern for meal subscription companies and grocery stores. The USDA
and the EPA announced goals to reduce food loss and waste by 50% by 2030.

Acc. To a survey 86.5% of people believe they waste less than other households of the same
size. Setting aside the impossibility that this statistic reflects reality, it highlights the importance
of shifting the way we approach food waste. The first step in enabling behavior change around
food waste is educating both consumers and foodservice professionals on the reality of the food
waste issue. A common misconception about waste is that people perceive that they
(individually or as a foodservice operation) produce less food waste than other entities of
similar scope—or that they produce no waste at all, in the case of some foodservice operators.
In foodservice, waste has long been the elephant in the room that no one wanted to admit was
present. The reality is that even the best foodservice operations have some amount of waste,
and we need to change the way we view food waste and think of it as an opportunity for
improvement rather than an indication of failure. The following countries are the countries that
are affected the most by food deprivation: Africa, India, and Pakistan. Many of the people
affected by food waste are little children; about 5 million children die of starvation per year.
Tons of food is dumped to landfills each year when the food thrown away is edible. The people
around the world who starve can be saved and can be fed. What needs to happen is that people
need to send more food to these people. In India, where the maximum food waste comes from
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the agricultural waste sector. A report submitted by Rabo India Finance, a private consultancy
firm, in 2007 to the government of India estimates a whopping 58,000 crores worth of rupees
are lost due to agricultural food waste, alone. Food that we Buy, Eat and Waste is directly
related to the Global crisis we are facing.
Food is lost or wasted along the whole food supply chain: on the farm, in processing and
manufacture, in shops, in restaurants and canteens and in the home. The reasons for food waste
vary widely and can be sector-specific.

Factors contributing to food waste include:

 Insufficient shopping and meal planning and promotions like "buy one get one free"
leading to too much food being purchased or prepared

 Misunderstandings about the meaning of "best before" and "use by" date labels leading to
edible foods being thrown away

 Standardized portion sizes in restaurants and canteens

 Difficulty in anticipating the number of customers (a problem for catering services);

 Stock management issues for manufacturers and retailers

 High quality standards (eg. for produce sold at retail)

 Overproduction or lack of demand for certain products at certain times of the year;
product and packaging damage(farmers and food manufacturing)

 Inadequate storage/transport at all stages of the food chain

Underlying all these problems is an overall lack of awareness, by many actors, of the sheer scale
of the problem and the benefits that come from reducing food waste.

From preventing from food wastage government of different countries making certain laws like
Japan has various laws pertaining to the different causes of food wastage, such as Container &
Packaging Recycling Law’, ‘Food Wastes Recycling Law’ and even a ‘Law on promoting Green
Purchase’, enabling industries and agriculturists to look towards effective uses of resources and
also join the eco drive – which needs more initiatives like these. However, food waste can be
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tackled in more effective ways, with the help of various schematic and planned methods
implemented by the governments and private firms simultaneously. Food waste, like other waste
can be dumped but could also be used for various other purposes such as feeding animals or be
biodegraded by various methods such as a composting and used for soil enrichment.

We can easily reduce the food wastage by simple tips like

 Plan your meals for the week before you go shopping and buy only the things needed for
those meals.
 Buy only what you need and will use. Buying in bulk only saves money if you are able to
use the food before it spoils.

 When you get home from the store, take the time to wash, dry, chop, dice, slice, and
place your fresh food items in clear storage containers for snacks and easy cooking.
 Use or lose your food - 60% of us end up throwing away food because it’s passed its
‘use-by’ date.
 Love your leftovers - more than half of households say they throw away food because
they’ve cooked too much. So cook that much how much you need.

If you can’t reduce waste food then Nutritious, safe, and untouched food can be donated to food
banks to help those in need. Because there is a lot of people present in your surrounding who
sleep in hunger.

“The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the
mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance,
illness, poverty or hunger.”

― Fidel Castro
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Chapter-5
Food Wastage and Our Environment
The United Nations estimates that one in nine people in the world do not have access to
sufficient food to lead a healthy life. More people are reported to die from hunger every day
than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. But at the same time, nearly one-third of the
food that is produced in the world is lost or wasted due to one reason or the other. Food
wastage, which includes both food loss and food waste, is not only morally irresponsible, but
also causes huge economic losses as well as severe damage to the world around us. The
global volume of food wasted per year is estimated to be 1.3 tonnes. This can be compared to
the total agricultural production (for food and non-food uses such as textile fibers, energy
crops of medicinal plants), which is about 6 tonnes. Acc. To report of FOA The carbon
footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated at 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases:
making food wastage the third top GHG emitter after the U.S. and China .Globally, the blue
water footprint (i.e. the consumption of surface and groundwater resources) of food wastage
is about 250 cubic kilometers (km3), which is equivalent to the annual water discharge of the
Volga river, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva. Produced but uneaten food occupies
almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; representing nearly 30 percent of the world’s agricultural
land area. Fifty-four percent of the world’s food wastage occurs “upstream” during
production, post-harvest handling and storage, according to FAO’s study. About 46 percent
of it happens “downstream,” at the processing, distribution and consumption stages. And
beyond its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers of food
wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually.

food waste is the second largest category of municipal solid waste sent to landfills. About 40
percent of food goes uneaten and gets thrown away to landfills and potentially contributes to
greenhouse gas emissions especially with the production of methane, a greenhouse gas that is
twenty-one times more potent than carbon dioxide and one of the most dangerous to the
environment. Food waste contributes to greenhouse gas emissions by the decomposition of
food in landfills and the life cycle, which begins at the stage of production all the way to
consumption. Not many people realize that they are the biggest contributors to the increase in
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methane emissions when they throw out their food as a producer, seller, or consumer. The
increased need to reduce food waste is likely to have a profound affect in the environment as
it reduces methane emissions and the effect it will have on climate change. Diverting food
waste will help reduce the occupancy it makes in landfills and reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.

Due to food waste More than 50 percent of the waste occurs during “upstream” or the
production, yield handling and storage phase and the remaining happens during processing,
distribution and consumption stages or the “downstream” phase. If you look at land usage,
around 1.4 billion hectares of land, which is roughly one-third the world’s total agricultural
land area, is used to grow food that is wasted. Millions of gallons of oil are also wasted every
year to produce food that is not eaten. And all this does not even take into account the
negative impacts on biodiversity due to activities like monocropping and converting wild
lands into agricultural areas. His collateral damage of food waste far exceeds a mere loss of
potential caloric intake; like a broken motor hungrily guzzling resources, the waste of food is
an exponential loss of resources. Cleaning up our food waste mess and shifting wildlife
populations back to natural resources increases competition and ultimately “benefits higher
quality individuals,”
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Conclusion

This study has compiled and analyzed on food losses and waste. Waste levels and waste
volumes in each step of the food supply chain were estimated. Causes of and possible ways
to prevent food losses and waste in each step of the food supply chain were reported. While
increasing primary food production is paramount to meet the future increase in final demand,
tensions between production and access to food can also be reduced by tapping into the
potential to reduce food losses. Efficient solutions exist along the whole food chain, for
reducing total amounts of food lost and wasted.

An amazing 24 percent of all food calories grown today are lost or wasted between the farm
and the fork. This fact is ultimately a failure of economic and natural resource efficiency.
The world faced an analogous failure of efficiency in the 1970s with energy. In the face of
record oil prices and growing demand, the world essentially declared war on energy
wastefulness and significantly improved its energy efficiency. Yet a “war on waste” has yet
to be waged when it comes to food. Given that food prices recently hit historic highs and
global food demand continues to rise, now is the time.

The way that loss and waste occur in developing countries in the future also matters a great
deal. South and Southeast Asia, for example, will need to avoid growing into the food waste
patterns of North America if the 50 percent global reduction target we propose in this
working paper is to be achieved.

Going forward, improved strategies for tackling consumption waste will need to be a priority
for research and innovation for the global community dedicated to reducing food loss and
waste.
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