South Africa produces enough food to feed all its people

Farmers, agriculture processing plants, food manufacturers, retailers, warehousing and logistics companies, food distributors, and thousands of other businesses that operate in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, all typically generate huge amounts of so-called “waste”. Since most of this food, if intercepted in time, is good for human consumption, we prefer to refer to it as surplus food.

This food becomes “surplus” because of inherent weaknesses in the consumer goods value chain.

 

About a third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. Approximately half of this food loss takes place during harvesting.

Processing, packaging, distribution and retail account for a further 45% of wasted food.

 

The remaining 5% of food waste is the responsibility of consumers (according to the WWF Surplus Food Report 2018). Clearly, our efforts to divert food must be directed at the pre-consumer phases.

Before we delve deeper into why we have so much surplus food and why it’s not getting to those who need it, it’s important to clarify what we mean by surplus food. There are huge misconceptions around this issue.

Surplus food is not expired food, lower-grade food, or rotten food. It is perfectly good food. Because of unforeseen circumstances in the food value chain, more than 10-million tonnes of food is lost or wasted every year.

Some examples of why food becomes surplus include:

  • Overproduction
  • Poor forecasting
  • Specification requirements
  • Incorrectly labelled products
  • Damaged goods
  • Errors in manufacturing, packaging or logistics phases
  • Short-dated products and confusion around date labelling

Sadly, almost all of this good-quality edible surplus food is dumped in landfills or incinerated.

But if it is intercepted in time, surplus food can be diverted to address the growing problem of hunger and food poverty across South Africa.

This is what HASHTAG SA UNITE has been doing for more than 2 years now. We try to recover edible surplus food from our supply chain partners and redistribute it to registered charities and individuals that use the food to make meals for vulnerable people in under-served communities.

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South Africa has a net surplus of food as a country – yet food poverty at the household level is widening, and now even more rapidly so because the pandemic is decimating our economy and jobs at an alarming rate.

About a third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. Approximately half of this food loss takes place during harvesting.

Processing, packaging, distribution and retail account for a further 45% of wasted food.

The remaining 5% of food waste is the responsibility of consumers (according to the WWF Surplus Food Report 2018). Clearly, our efforts to divert food must be directed at the pre-consumer phases.

Before we delve deeper into why we have so much surplus food and why it’s not getting to those who need it, it’s important to clarify what we mean by surplus food. There are huge misconceptions around this issue.sing and logistics companies, food distributors, and thousands of other businesses that operate in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, all typically generate huge amounts of so-called “waste”. Since most of this food, if intercepted in time, is good for human consumption, we prefer to refer to it as surplus food.

This food becomes “surplus” because of inherent weaknesses in the consumer goods value chain.

South Africa has a net surplus of food as a country – yet food poverty at the household level is widening, and now even more rapidly so because the pandemic is decimating our economy and jobs at an alarming rate.