One major front for action in the effort to reduce food wastage is developing better food harvest, storage, processing, transport and retailing processes, according to FAO's guide, Toolkit: Reducing the Food Wastage Footprint, and a summary report released on the environmental consequences of food waste.

Harvest losses have several causes, including bad timing and poor conditions during the harvest as well as inadequate techniques and equipment. Similarly, lack of good infrastructure for transportation, storage, cooling and marketing cause food to spoil, especially in hot climates.

Both the private and public sectors need to increase investments to address such shortcomings; doing so will also have additional benefits for food security and mitigating climate change, land degradation and biodiversity erosion.

The United Nations recognizes this phenomenon, called land degradation, as a global developmental and environmental issue. In this context, the land occupation figures calculated in this study have been complemented with data from the FAO Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands (LADA) model (FAOLADA 2011) in order to give a preliminary view of the linkage between aspects of land occupation of food wastage and land degradation.

FAO's new report is the first study to focus on the environmental impacts of food wastage.
1. The global volume of food wastage is estimated at 1.6 billion tonnes of "primary product equivalents." Total food wastage for the edible part of this amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes.
2. Food wastage's carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent of GHG released into the atmosphere per year.
3. The total volume of water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted (250km3) is equivalent to the annual flow of Russia's Volga River, or three times the volume of Lake Geneva.
4. Similarly, 1.4 billion hectares of land - 28 percent of the world's agricultural area - is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted.
5. Agriculture is responsible for a majority of threats to at-risk plant and animal species tracked by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
6. A low percentage of all food wastage is composted: much of it ends up in landfills, and represents a large part of municipal solid waste. Methane emissions from landfills represents one of the largest sources of GHG emissions from the waste sector.
7. Home composting can potentially divert up to 150 kg of food waste per household per year from local collection authorities.
8. Developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while in middle- and high-income regions, food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher.
9. The direct economic consequences of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion annually.

What is food wastage?

Food loss is the unintended reduction in food available for human consumption, resulting from inefficiencies in supply chains: poor infrastructure and logistics or lack of technology, insufficient skills or poor management capacity. It mainly occurs during production or postharvest processing, e.g. when crops go unharvested or produce is thrown out during processing, storage or transport.

Food waste refers to intentional discards of edible items, mainly by retailers and consumers, and is due to the behavior of businesses and individuals.

The term food wastage refers to the two in combination.