China's annual food waste equals the rations of more than 30 million people

Just how serious is the food waste problem in China? A fairly popular claim is that the food China wastes each year is almost equivalent to a year's rations for 200 million people; the catering association conservatively estimated that in 2010 China's catering industry generated at least 210 billion yuan worth of food waste. However, according to the findings of a research team from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, based on surveys from 2013 to 2015, China's catering food waste amounts to about 17 million to 18 million tonnes per year, equivalent to a year's rations for 30 million to 50 million people.

"We carried out surveys lasting more than 100 days in 4 cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Lhasa and Chengdu - covering 366 restaurants and 6,983 dining table samples, completing more than 750 interviews and 7,482 consumer questionnaires, weighing more than 32,000 dishes and taking more than 100,000 weight measurements in total." On November 26, at the "Reducing Food Waste - International Symposium on a Multi-Stakeholder Platform for Sustainable Food Supply Chains and Consumption," held in Beijing and jointly hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme, the All-China Environment Federation and other organizations, researcher Cheng Shengkui of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, briefed reporters on the results of his national research project on food waste.

At present, the food crisis and the phenomenon of food waste have together drawn worldwide attention. "As the source of our food, agriculture uses 70% of freshwater resources and 30% of global energy, occupies 33% of the land, and produces 20% of greenhouse gases. Even so, one-ninth of the world's population still cannot get enough food," said Yu Xin, sustainable agriculture and food specialist at the World Wide Fund for Nature.

"Humanity has always been doing addition, using technological innovation, greater use of fossil energy and various other factors to meet ever-growing demand," Yu Xin said. This has also brought problems such as soil degradation, water shortages and environmental pollution, he added: "If development continues at the current rate, by 2030 we may need two Earths."

But the other side of the story is that one-third of the world's food is wasted. "About 1.3 billion tonnes of grain is wasted at every stage of the entire food supply chain, which is equivalent to 1.4 billion hectares of land and 250 billion cubic metres of surface water and groundwater devoted to agricultural production being wasted every year," said Xu Jie, deputy director of the Department of International Cooperation of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

"Why does the United Nations Environment Programme attach so much importance to the food waste problem? Because waste causes 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions," said James Lomax, representative of the United Nations Environment Programme. "At the same time, how to deal with wasted food also puts great pressure on the environment." Yu Xin appealed: "We cannot only do addition; we need to do more subtraction when it comes to food waste."

To this end, the 12th goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals stipulates that by 2030, global per capita food waste at the retail and consumer levels should be halved, and food losses in production and supply, including post-harvest losses, should be reduced. In 2014, the European Union launched the "Horizon 2020" programme, and in 2015 set up the "REFRESH" project to achieve the goal of reducing food waste by 30% by 2025. In Asia, countries such as Japan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Laos have also successfully carried out food education, the "Zero Hunger" campaign and other initiatives.

In China, in addition to the well-known "Clean Plate Campaign," the research results of the Cheng Shengkui team at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, are also playing a positive role in reducing food waste in China. Their surveys found that the per capita food waste of school meals in primary and secondary schools reached 89.94 grams, not only far higher than that of university canteens and staff canteens, but also higher than the average level of the catering industry.

Based on this situation, the advisory report submitted by the Cheng Shengkui team received great attention and led Beijing to carry out a series of educational activities among primary and secondary school students, such as working in the fields and cooking hands-on. In September this year, the International Department of the Second Affiliated High School of Beijing Normal University became the first stop of the campus activity "Reducing Food Waste, We Are in Action," jointly carried out by the All-China Environment Federation and the China office of IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute.