Special Interest: Food Waste
“If we wish to build a future where no one is left behind, we must create a present that radically rejects the squandering of food," says Pope Francis.
#StoptheWaste is a global campaign to raise awareness about the huge amounts of edible food that is discarded every day – a habit that must be overcome if we are to make real progress in eradicating global hunger.
Ready for Storage! With hermetic bags, smallholder farmers retain more than 98 % of their harvest! In Malawi, WFP has trained 61,000 members of farmer organizations, 49 percent of whom were women, in post-harvest handling so they can #StopThe Waste and make more money.
90 percent of Burundi's population is entirely dependent on agriculture, yet the country doesn't produce nearly enough food to feed everyone. Cutting food loss can help.
Three-hundred farmers each received eight specially-made, airtight, 110-pound bags to protect their grains from insects, rodents, mold and moisture. The results were astonishing.
Around 70% of Rwandans work in the agricultural sector, yet they lose vast amounts of their harvest before it ever reaches their plates or markets.
Johnson Kagoye, WFP government partnerships officer in Uganda, is committed to ending hunger by reducing food waste and loss.
Food loss and food waste are major contributors to global hunger. If we could recover all the food we waste, we could feed every hungry person on the planet twice over.
What does waste and environmental sustainability look like for the world’s largest humanitarian organization?
At a time when 1 in 9 people go to bed hungry every day while obesity is on the rise, the United Nations has challenged the world to cut global food waste in half by 2030.
Africa’s small-scale farmers lose up to 40% of all the food they harvest. Today, 320,000 farmers across Africa, over half of which are women, participate in WFP’s Zero Food Loss Initiative.
Africa’s smallholder families lose up to 40 percent of their harvest to insects, rodents and mould. But a simple solution can virtually eliminate such losses and improve families’ incomes, food availability, health and nutrition.