By the A.M. Costa Rica staff

Latin America and the Caribbean accounts for  20 percent of the global amount of food that is lost from post-harvest up to but excluding the retail stage, according to the new Food and Agricultural Organization report, “The State of Food and Agriculture 2019.”

According to the report, while the region only accounts for 9 percent of the global population, one fifth of all the food that is lost globally from post-harvest up to but excluding the retail stage, is produced in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The report notes that, worldwide, causes of food loss and waste differ widely along the food supply chain. Important causes of on-farm losses include inadequate harvesting time, climatic conditions, practices applied at harvest and handling and challenges in marketing produce.

Significant losses are caused by inadequate storage conditions as well as decisions made at earlier stages of the supply chain, which predispose products to a shorter shelf life. Adequate cold storage, in particular, can be crucial to prevent quantitative and qualitative food losses, said the report.

During transportation, good physical infrastructure and efficient trade logistics are of key importance to prevent food losses, it added. Processing and packaging can play a role in preserving foods, but losses can be caused by inadequate facilities as well as technical malfunction or human error.

Focusing only on the loses that occur in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the region loses 12 percent of its food from post-harvest up to but excluding the retail stage, slightly lower than the global average, which reaches 14 percent.

When this same loss is considered in terms of calories, the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean lose 14 percent of the calories they produce.

According to the report, food loss and waste have three types of quantifiable environmental footprints: carbon footprint, land footprint, water footprint.

The carbon footprint of food is the total amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted throughout the food’s life cycle, expressed in carbon dioxide equivalent: Latin America and the Caribbean accounts for 16 percent of the global carbon footprint resulting from food losses and waste, said the report.

“The land footprint is the land area needed to produce food, and the region accounts for 9 percent of the world’s total land footprint due to food loss and waste,” said the report.

In terms of the water footprint, the measure of all the fresh water used to produce and supply the food to the final consumer, Latin America accounts for 5 percent of the global water footprint associated with food loss and waste

All these impacts consider the environmental effects of food lost and wasted from the post-harvest stage to retail as opposed to the food loss figures presented above.

The “State of Food and Agriculture 2019” full report can be reached at the FAO site.*








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