Missing Food, Missing Data? A Critical Review of Global Food Losses and Food Waste Data

Food losses and food waste (FLW)
have become a global concern in
recent years and emerge as a priority in the global and national political
agenda (e.g., with Target 12.3 in the new United Nations Sustainable
Development Goals). A good understanding of the availability and quality
of global FLW data is a prerequisite for tracking progress on reduction
targets, analyzing environmental impacts, and exploring mitigation
strategies for FLW. There has been a growing body of literature on
FLW quantification in the past years; however, significant challenges
remain, such as data inconsistency and a narrow temporal, geographical,
and food supply chain coverage. In this paper, we examined 202 publications
which reported FLW data for 84 countries and 52 individual years from
1933 to 2014. We found that most existing publications are conducted
for a few industrialized countries (e.g., the United Kingdom and the
United States), and over half of them are based only on secondary
data, which signals high uncertainties in the existing global FLW
database. Despite these uncertainties, existing data indicate that
per-capita food waste in the household increases with an increase
of per-capita GDP. We believe that more consistent, in-depth, and
primary-data-based studies, especially for emerging economies, are
badly needed to better inform relevant policy on FLW reduction and
environmental impacts mitigation.