USD 940 billion. This is what human food waste costs consumers, farmers and businesses each year.
A third of all food produced for humans is wasted. This means that 24% of all the water we use for agriculture is also wasted. And food waste causes 8% of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions.
In this op-ed written for the Huffington Post, Nestlé CEO Paul Bulcke and Andrew Steer, President and CEO of the World Resources Institute, discuss how we can halve food waste by 2030, under United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3.
To achieve this target, they argue, businesses and governments need consistent guidance on how to reduce food waste, which the first Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard provides.