Excellent news: Fifty per cent of food grown is wasted

Re, report from Institute of Mechanical Engineers, summary and download here.

1. I mean, it's a terrible shame that it is wasted (or that people waste all that time and energy growing food which is wasted, they could be relaxing instead), but that puts paid to the myth that there is not enough land left to grow food on to feed us all. The problem is storage, transport, the distorting effect of subsidies*, warfare, and to be fair, the fact that Western consumers are incredibly fussy about the shape of vegetables they buy (most of which are going to be chopped up small anyway).

2. If the IME's lower estimate of 30% being wasted is correct, and assuming that the starving millions (whose problems are mainly caused by warfare and land grabbing, separate issues) could easily be fed from the food that is bought but not eaten in the fussy West, then that means feeding a global population of ten billion won't be a big problem. With a bit of luck, by the time we've got that far, the "wealth effect" which reduces the birth rate will cancel out population growth in those areas where the population is still growing (where, exactly?) and that's the end of that.

3. I have a sneaking suspicion that the IME originally wanted to talk up their own game a bit by explaining that if only there was more engineering involved in agriculture (irrigation, storage, transport etc) that less food would be lost between field and table, but then the authors realised that there are loads of other types of waste as well.

4. A reader's letter in today's Metro reminded us that Indian agriculture is in the same mess as anywhere else, with just as much waste, see e.g. here. Compared to that, the Western farming-agriculture system (the biggest Socialist experiment outside the military-industrial bloc) is hyper-efficient.