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People forget food is about land, water, labour

  • 14/09/2009

People forget food is about land, water, labour Producing food simply to dump it is a waste of land, water, energy required for growing, processing and transporting it. Tristram Stuart,author of the recently published book, Waste, Uncovering the Food Scandal, shows how the way we live has created a global food crisis and how simple it would be to fix it. Kaushik Das Gupta spoke to him over phone. Excerpts

On the enormity of the problem

In Europe and North America up to half of the food produced is wasted. If you include cereals used as animal feed like wheat, soy and maize, America has nearly four times the food its population requires and Europe has three to four times. When rich countries waste millions of tonnes of food, we are unnecessarily taking it out of the world market. It has a direct effect on the ability of other parts of the world to buy food. But unlike most environmental problems, solving this does not involve great sacrifice. It

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