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      Understanding Food Loss and Waste—Why Are We Losing and Wasting Food?

      review-article
      1 , 2 , 3 , *
      Foods
      MDPI
      food loss, food waste, waste management, waste prevention, food security

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          Abstract

          The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reported that approximately one-third of all produced foods (1.3 billion tons of edible food) for human consumption is lost and wasted every year across the entire supply chain. Significant impacts of food loss and waste (FLW) have increased interest in establishing prevention programs around the world. This paper aims to provide an overview of FLW occurrence and prevention. Economic, political, cultural, and socio-demographic drivers of FLW are described, highlighting the global variation. This approach might be particularly helpful for scientists, governors, and policy makers to identify the global variation and to focus on future implications. The main focus here was to identify the cause of the FLW occurrence throughout the food supply chain. We have created a framework for FLW occurrence at each stage of the food supply chain. Several feasible solutions are provided based on the framework.

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          Most cited references80

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          Food waste within food supply chains: quantification and potential for change to 2050

          Food waste in the global food supply chain is reviewed in relation to the prospects for feeding a population of nine billion by 2050. Different definitions of food waste with respect to the complexities of food supply chains (FSCs)are discussed. An international literature review found a dearth of data on food waste and estimates varied widely; those for post-harvest losses of grain in developing countries might be overestimated. As much of the post-harvest loss data for developing countries was collected over 30 years ago, current global losses cannot be quantified. A significant gap exists in the understanding of the food waste implications of the rapid development of ‘BRIC’ economies. The limited data suggest that losses are much higher at the immediate post-harvest stages in developing countries and higher for perishable foods across industrialized and developing economies alike. For affluent economies, post-consumer food waste accounts for the greatest overall losses. To supplement the fragmentary picture and to gain a forward view, interviews were conducted with international FSC experts. The analyses highlighted the scale of the problem, the scope for improved system efficiencies and the challenges of affecting behavioural change to reduce post-consumer waste in affluent populations.
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            Lost food, wasted resources: global food supply chain losses and their impacts on freshwater, cropland, and fertiliser use.

            Reducing food losses and waste is considered to be one of the most promising measures to improve food security in the coming decades. Food losses also affect our use of resources, such as freshwater, cropland, and fertilisers. In this paper we estimate the global food supply losses due to lost and wasted food crops, and the resources used to produce them. We also quantify the potential food supply and resource savings that could be made by reducing food losses and waste. We used publically available global databases to conduct the study at the country level. We found that around one quarter of the produced food supply (614 kcal/cap/day) is lost within the food supply chain (FSC). The production of these lost and wasted food crops accounts for 24% of total freshwater resources used in food crop production (27 m(3)/cap/yr), 23% of total global cropland area (31 × 10(-3)ha/cap/yr), and 23% of total global fertiliser use (4.3 kg/cap/yr). The per capita use of resources for food losses is largest in North Africa & West-Central Asia (freshwater and cropland) and North America & Oceania (fertilisers). The smallest per capita use of resources for food losses is found in Sub-Saharan Africa (freshwater and fertilisers) and in Industrialised Asia (cropland). Relative to total food production, the smallest food supply and resource losses occur in South & Southeast Asia. If the lowest loss and waste percentages achieved in any region in each step of the FSC could be reached globally, food supply losses could be halved. By doing this, there would be enough food for approximately one billion extra people. Reducing the food losses and waste would thus be an important step towards increased food security, and would also increase the efficiency of resource use in food production. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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              The food waste hierarchy as a framework for the management of food surplus and food waste

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Foods
                Foods
                foods
                Foods
                MDPI
                2304-8158
                29 July 2019
                August 2019
                : 8
                : 8
                : 297
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of Information, Turkmen Agricultural Institute, Dashoguz 746300, Turkmenistan
                [2 ]Division of Food and Marketing Research, Korea Rural Economic Institute, Naju 58217, Korea
                [3 ]Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, Kangwon National University, Chuncheon 24341, Korea
                Author notes
                [* ]Correspondence: shl@ 123456kangwon.ac.kr ; Tel.: +82-33-250-8662
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1610-9994
                Article
                foods-08-00297
                10.3390/foods8080297
                6723314
                31362396
                bf1395e8-0d27-426d-a983-34771effac6f
                © 2019 by the authors.

                Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

                History
                : 16 March 2019
                : 26 July 2019
                Categories
                Review

                food loss,food waste,waste management,waste prevention,food security

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