If a quarter of the food wasted each day could be given to people who need it, there would be more than enough to feed every malnourished person on earth, according to the UN. Every year nearly half of all fruit and vegetables, more than 30 per cent of seafood, and 20 per cent of dairy and meat products is discarded, perfectly edible food – 1.3 billion tonnes in all. Meanwhile almost 800 million people live with severe hunger and malnutrition.
Every country wastes food, but the developed world gets rid of astonishing quantities. A 2011 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated annual waste for the average European and North American between 95-115kg, up to fifteen times more than their counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa and south and south-east Asia.
For generations, First World kids who didn’t want to eat vegetables were told about hungry children in the global south. Today they needn’t look so far afield. Nearly 60 million Americans live in food insecure households even though, according to the US Department of Agriculture, last year their compatriots binned a staggering 133 billion pounds of food – enough to provide more than 1,200 daily calories to every American for a year. Across the pond, the news isn’t much better. In April, an Oxford University report on UK food security found that during the last five years the number of active food banks in local council areas had risen from 29 to 251 and the distribution of emergency food aid had tripled.
Malnutrition shocks the conscience when we see starving children in faraway countries, but its lesser-noticed consequences are often just as disturbing. In April the Washington Post reported that neuroscientists who analyzed the brains of 1,100 children and young adults found that families with incomes lower than US25,000 produced children whose brains were 6 per cent smaller than those from families with incomes of US$150,000. The poorer children also “scored lower on average on a battery of cognitive tests.”
In the Caribbean we may waste far less food than citizens of the developed world, but food losses due to insufficient production, management and distribution networks often produce a comparable squandering of resources. As our 2011 Food and Nutrition Strategy notes, Guyana “continues to be one of the few Caribbean countries that can be considered to be self-sufficient in food production” but there are concerns about “the growing food import trend, especially in urban and peri-urban areas, and even some rural communities.”
Like many postcolonial economies, we prize imports over local food even though it is often inferior. Rural and hinterland communities expend more than half of their disposable incomes on food in part because of an “observed shift in the food consumption patterns away from traditional diets based on home produce to more varied energy-dense diets based on purchased processed foods and beverages.”
The Strategy observes that in addition to limited access to quality food, poor households often cannot afford a basic “food basket”: “Limited income hinders [their access to] sufficient, safe and nutritious food.” Furthermore, low-income households “generally do not consume nutritionally balanced meals.” Troublingly, a 2007 Food Security Assessment and 2010 Rural Sector Review both found “a significant proportion of Guyana’s population is food insecure and vulnerable” even though poverty had declined significantly between 1992 and 2004. The Strategy concludes: “The primary causes of poverty and food insecurity in Guyana remain the same: lack of the material and means for satisfying basic human needs. Thus, there are some sections of the population that are poor and food-insecure because they lack income, resources and food.”
Many complex developmental challenges face this country, and several of them may take a generation, or more, to be met. But given our vast agricultural resources, farming expertise, and our potential – as every schoolchild used to know – to be the “breadbasket” of the Caribbean, food security shouldn’t be one of them.
