Today, there are 900 million hungry people worldwide and one billion people overfed. Under the current production and consumption trends, global food production will need to increase by 60 percent by 2050.

The global economic cost of food wastage, based on 2009 producer prices, is USD750 billion, approximately the 2011 GDP of Turkey or Switzerland.
The lost grain in sub-Saharan Africa only could meet the minimum annual food requirement of 48 million people.

Lost and wasted food represents a missed opportunity to feed the growing world population. It also comes at a steep environmental price, as land quality, water quantity, biodiversity are adversely affected.
Wasted food also has a strong impact on global climate change.

Food lost after harvest and food wasted along the distribution and consumption chain, or food wastage, has a dual negative environmental impact: undue pressure on natural resources and ecosystem services and pollution through food discards.
Within the global context of increasingly scarce natural resources, more than one-third of the food produced today is not eaten, which is about 1.3 billion tonnes per year.

Intensive farming, without allowing fields to lie fallow and replenish, diminishes soil fertility. Not using roughly one-third of the food produced globally means that soil is unnecessarily pressured.

Decreased soil quality leads to further use of synthetic inputs that cause pollution and eventually, loss of arable land. In 2007, almost 1.4 billion hectares of land were used to produce food not consumed. This represent a surface larger than Canada and India together. Major contributors to land occupation of food wastage are meat and milk, with 78 percent of the total surface, whereas their contribution to total food wastage is 11 percent.

Agriculture already uses 70 percent of the global freshwater withdrawal and any increased production will likely mean more water use. Water will be a key constraint to global security and when food is wasted, the water is squandered.
In 2007, the global blue water footprint for the agricultural production of food wastage was about 250 km3; 3.6 times the blue water footprint of total USA consumption. In terms of volume, it represents almost 3 times the volume of Lake Geneva, or the annual water discharge of the Volga River. Cereals, fruits and meat are major contributors to the blue water footprint of food wastage.

Food and agriculture systems heavily depend on fossil-fuel energy. Petroleum is used in almost every aspect of food production, from creating fertilizers, to mechanized planting and harvesting, irrigation, cooling and transportation. Furthermore, when food is discarded in a landfill and decomposes anaerobically, it yields methane emissions, a gas more than 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat. In 2007, the global carbon footprint, excluding land use change, of food waste has been estimated at 3.3 Gtonnes of CO2eq.

This amount is more than twice the total GHG emissions of all USA road transportation in 2010. If integrated into a country ranking of top emitters, food wastage would appear third, after USA and China, according to the latest data available. Food is the primary source of landfill gas and the largest component of materials sent to landfills. In USA, landfill gas is responsible for 17 percent of USA methane emissions.

The food not eaten is one of several factors that contributes to biodiversity loss through habitat change, overexploitation, pollution and climate change.
Prompted in part by global food production inefficiency, 9.7 million hectares are deforested annually to grow food; this represent 74 percent of total annual deforestation.

Food wastage contributes to agricultural expansion into wild areas and increased fishing efforts that unduly overexploit forest and marine habitats. This results in loss of wildlife, including mammals, birds, fishes and amphibians. Up to 70 percent of all fish caught by certain types of trawling is discarded.