Missing food, missing data? A critical review of global food losses and food waste data

Food losses and food waste has become a global concern in recent years and emerges as a priority in global and national political agenda (e.g., the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 12.3). A good understanding... [ view full abstract ]

Food losses and food waste has become a global concern in recent years and emerges as a priority in global and national political agenda (e.g., the new United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 12.3). A good understanding of the availability and quality of global food wastage data is a prerequisite for benchmarking any reduction targets, analyzing environmental impacts, and exploring mitigation strategies of food wastage. There has been a growing body of literature on food wastage quantification in the past years; however, they still suffer from several gaps, such as inconsistency and a narrow temporal, geographical, and life cycle stage coverage. In this paper, we have examined 202 publications which report food wastage data of 84 countries and 52 individual years from 1933 to 2014. We found that most existing publications are conducted for a few industrialized countries (e.g., UK and USA) and over half of them were based only on literature data, which signals uncertainties in the existing global food wastage database. Per capita food waste in the household and food service sector increases with an increasing of per capita GDP. We believe more consistent, in-depth, and primary data based studies, especially for those emerging economies, would be needed in order to better inform relevant policy on food waste reduction and environmental impacts mitigation.