Food Wastage in Singapore

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW, every day last year, each person in Singapore wasted an equivalent of one packet economy rice where experts say it is about 400 grams of food wasted every day. All this added up to an astounding record of 796,000 tonnes - the weight of about 1,420 fully loaded Airbus A-380s - of food waste, according to National Environment Agency statistics released in march. Millions of people around the world go to bed hungry every night, and yet millions of tons of food end up in trash cans. Singapore's food waste comes from many different sources which are food manufacturers, supermarkets, hotels and restaurants. Not forgetting each individuals in households, we are all guilty of wasting food. In addition, small unforeseen actions like pressing a mango to check whether it is ripe, can damage the fruit itself and chances are, it will be left unsold. If you were to refer to the photo below, the amount of food that we waste is equivalent to the size of 600 Olympic Swimming Pool. This basically shows that we are wasting food in large scale and it isn't a good sign because food, a resource, is finite.

A figure comparison of food wastage with swimming pools

If this were to go on, we will all end up with no food to consume. The problem can only be solved by identifying the cause. We humans, are the main culprit of food wastage. Hence, the responsibility lies on us. If you refer to the photo below, a child dies every 5 seconds as a result of hunger. Not everyone is as fortunate as us, being able to fill our stomach and avoid starvation. So why are you wasting food? We must all play a part by altering our bad customs in our daily lives so that food, a paramount necessity of life, can be utilized well. Today, let's begin the first move to do our part in minimizing food wastage.

 Statistic of children dying due to hunger

Overproduction the main cause of food wastage

Large amount of food being wasted daily

“It’s better to have more than less” and we are producing way more food than what the population needs which has led to excessive consumption and obesity. Apart from that, it undermines agriculture in the developing countries, hindering the eradication of hunger and poverty. If you refer to the photo with the graph below, it shows a graph of the food losses and waste per capital and year. It is evident from the graph that production to retailing contributes heavily to food wastage. On top of that, according to the World Bank’s quarterly Food Price Watch report, with the developed world leading the wastage, the world loses a staggering one-quarter to one-third of all food produced for human consumption.  If the food are not recycled, these food waste will end up buried in landfills where it will eventually produce methane - a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. In addition, overproduction will cause all the money and resources used to produce food, which can be used for other areas, to go to waste as well.


Graph that shows the food loss and waste per year

Despite so, there are some potential solutions to limit the amount of food wasted by overproduction. They are,

• changing agricultural production techniques,

• making suitable investments in transport and storage infrastructure,

•  as well as changing commercial and consumer behavior in developed countries.