Danish on-farm food waste
🇩🇰 Rotten! Turns out Danish on-farm food waste is not 59000 tonnes per year as previously thought, but 128000 tonnes per year. What’s worse is this 117% increase only accounts for 15 different products (e.g. potatoes, eggs, milk, apples, etc.).
🗑️ Almost a year after a group of us launched a citizens’ petition arguing that “Wasting food should not pay off” (“Madspild skal ikke kunne betale sig”), Coop Danmark has finally admitted in the national press that “A lot of food waste happens because it pays off” (“Meget madspild foregår, fordi det kan betale sig”).
🌎 The farmers. The food manufacturers. The supermarkets. The consumers.
All are playing a major part of this gigantic and much-ignored problem.
Unlike its competitors, at least Coop Danmark has the honesty of being transparent about this shocking reality.
Farmers waste approx 30% of many fruit & veg harvests (e.g. parsnips, beetroot, carrots, etc.) because their produce are “too big, too small, too crooked” according to this Politiken article.
In the last decade, retailers have become much more strict in their specification requirements.
Does fruit & veg now have to be Instagrammable like the rest of society?
Anyway, these on-farm food waste revelations demonstrate why the UN’s Food Loss and Waste accounting system is truly absurd.
Supermarket food waste falls under “food waste”.
On-farm food waste falls under “food loss”.
Yet under this accounting system, even when supermarkets cause the vast majority of this on-farm food waste due to their ludicrously tight specifications, the farmer take the entire blame for this “food loss”.
Did the UN bureaucrats who designed this system ever consider whether farmers were happy dumping out 20 tonnes of their crop on a weekly?
Naturally, to meet their tough contract requirements, farmers significantly overproduce.
The result is that farmers use up much more land than is required, further accelerating biodiversity’s demise & increasing CO2e emissions.
This crucial study builds on the WWF-UK’s report "Driven to Waste: Global Food Loss on Farms" which estimated that total global food waste was not the previously assumed 1.3 billions wasted each year, but at least 2.5 billion tonnes of yearly food waste because of the colossal omissions of on-farm food waste.
A 90% increase overnight because essentially:
We don't have a clue.
The Ramboll study - commissioned by ONE\THIRD -
was carried out by Julia NuĂźholz, Cecillie L., Linette Vestergaard Jensen, and Niki Bey.
Politiken article by Annemette Grundtvig and Anders Holst Pedersen.
@anurbanharvester post
#foodsharing #foodwaste #foodshare #sustainability #danish