Research: Is food waste overstated?

A research study by Marc F. Bellemare et.al. questions the widely cited, extant measures of the quantity and value of food waste as published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The authors claim that those data are inconsistent with one another and overstate the problem of food waste.
Counting food recovered for non-food use as food waste is thought to be an important shortcoming in the FAO work. Key element in the study is the detailed analysis of the life-cycle of food, from harvest to (non) consumption. Bellemare warns against misallocating some of the resources that are currently put into food waste reduction efforts (Press Release AAEA, 19 June 2017).
Click here for the press release.
Click here to download the study (180 kB).

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