Shimbo Pastory and Johnson Mwamasangula
This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania, on 16th October 2022.
World Food Day is a collective action across 150 countries worldwide organizing hundreds of events and outreach activities to bring together governments, businesses, civil society organizations (SCOs), the media, and the general public.
It’s a day that promotes worldwide awareness and action for those who suffer from hunger and for the need to ensure healthy diets for all, leaving no one behind. Global action is mobilized online in over 50 languages.
World Food Day 2022, which is celebrated on October 16, is being marked in a year with multiple global challenges including the ongoing pandemic, regional sociopolitical endemics, military conflicts and adverse climatic changes which have resulted in a global rise of prices and international tensions.
Skyrocketing prices we are witnessing are the result of military conflicts going on in Ukraine, impacting the global supply of some of the most used food products, among others wheat, barley, rapeseed and sunflower.
The ripple effect continues to countries that were already vulnerable to catastrophic food crises, with Africa making up more than double the count of people living in hunger worldwide.
Global food insecurity
Acute food insecurity has been a song on replay in the region with a lot to talk about, but yet, solutions appear to prove low results. Though fertile and capable of self-sustenance and even transcontinental supply, Africa remains a hungry continent. Maybe politics and military conflicts have a part to play.
For example, Somalia highly depends on wheat imports from Ukraine and Russia. The war going on has led to a fallout that increases the food security risk of the already food-insecure country.
It is heartbreaking that the lives of hundreds of millions of people especially women and children in sub-Saharan Africa, South East and Central Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean have to suffer the aftershocks of both the military conflicts in the region and Eastern Europe, changing weather patterns, and Covid-19 outbreak.
The Local Situation
In Tanzania, despite currently producing averagely enough to feed its population of over 60 million people, the poorest rural and marginalized families, including refugees, face limited access to food. Climatic changes are deepening the vulnerability of agriculture production to disasters in this country that fetches 25% of its GDP from agriculture.
Researched country analysis from 2021-2022 has found that more than a million people experience a high level of acute food insecurity especially in rural parts of Handeni District Council, Longido, Mkinga and Monduli. The reasons behind being are said to be poor harvest, volatile weather conditions and crop diseases.
World Food Day should be commemorated in a manner that voices the establishment of irrigation schemes in rural areas, so that no one is left behind in agriculture production, rather than depending solely on the rainy season for farming.
But also, schemes that aimed at combating crop diseases and better harvesting to reduce the wasted food ratio that could have been used to feed the food insecure communities in the country are dearly needed.
Notwithstanding, it is not only military conflicts and poor food harvest that play a role in food insecurity globally, the World Food Day 2022 find us fighting to be resilient from extreme climatic changes which disproportionately affect the rural poor, their agricultural yields and productivity, contributing to increasing pests and diseases and changing the nutrient composition of major staple crops.
This has led to increasing food shortages when combined with instability caused by armed conflicts going on worldwide.
Food waste is a global concern
Though we are burdened with all these challenges, there is a new challenge to food security that not everyone is concerned about, which is food waste.
We know that ending hunger is not an easy task, but systemic checks are needed globally because there is the production of enough food to feed everyone on the planet today.
While more emphasis has been placed on the issue of access to and availability of healthy and nutritious food, less concern is placed on the food produced with hard work which is wasted in the farms, in the supply chain, and by the last consumer at home.
‘Leaving no one behind’ as a theme of 2022 World Food Day should spread awareness on the proper consumption of food by counting every ounce of food that is wasted as waste as a contribution to global hunger and a hindrance in funding vulnerable populations that face food crises and other related adversities.
Honestly, the mounted challenges leave about 3.1 billion people unable to afford a healthy diet and in the meantime putting about 193 million people at high risk of food insecurity and malnutrition, and as such requiring humanitarian assistance for their survival. Numbered among these, over half a million people globally face the catastrophe of starving to death every year.
We are speaking of half a million people who are about to die by just failing to afford at least two glasses of water, a plate of rice and a single fruit per day while globally we waste about 1.4 billion tons of food every year with the USA leading by discarding nearly 40 million tons of perfectly good consumable food per year.
According to Recycle Track Systems, a commercial waste and garbage company based in the USA, food takes up more space in US landfills than anything else.
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that about one-third of all food produced around the world is wasted, which means local and international food security initiatives failed to include and emphasize the importance of proper food consumption and storage as part of food security programs.
Furthermore, produced but uneaten food occupies 30% of the world’s agricultural land area, with the annual value of wasted food compounding $1 trillion. If we count on prices, Americans only waste more than $218 billion per year on tossed food.
Nearly one billion hungry people could be fed on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted in the US, UK and Europe alone. The water used to produce the food wasted (25% of the world’s freshwater supply) could be used by 9 billion people at around 200 litres per person per day which is a number exceeding the total world population.
Strategic approach
Reducing food waste should be among the critical solutions to the food insecurity challenges. When we implement holistic solutions for greater resilience to food insecurity, food waste management should be among the core agendas.
There is a need for deeper reflection on how to better address the global food security and nutrition situation.
We need to build a sustainable world where everyone, everywhere has regular access to enough nutritious food because it is no secret that population growth will reach 9 billion people in 2050 thus requires by then food production to be increased by 70% from today’s levels to meet the demands of food we strive to reach currently. This is a global concern, but local efforts are emphatically required.
As a global community, we all have a role to play in bringing forward those left behind, by making our agri-food systems more inclusive and sustainable, but also, ensuring that the produced food is properly used and stored.
From governments to private companies, civil societies, research and academia, and all individuals including the youth, we all need to be part of the change.
Regardless of their dependence on agriculture and natural resources for sustenance, it is tragic that two-thirds of the people experiencing acute food insecurity are rural food producers themselves.
Rural people are hardest hit by natural and man-made disasters and are often marginalized on the bases of their economic status, reduced political power, ethnicity and even gender.
It is the time global leaders invest in providing them with training, financial support, and technologies on food security, which include proper consumption schemes and fair supply chains.
When we speak about better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life, we should not leave behind better consumption. We are closing the day by saying, Stop Funding War, Fund Food for All!
