Recovering a ‘lost bounty’

“No. You can’t go and play until you finish everything on your plate.” That firm edict, from parents long gone, still resounds in our ears. “Other children have nothing to eat,” they’d drill into us four kids. “Waste not, want not.”

We’re grandparents now. One out of eight kids today, the world over, don’t get enough to eat, we tell  Kristin, 9, and Katarina, 6. Here, 4.3 million households suffer “involuntary hunger,” Social Weather Stations reported this October. “Hunger knows no master than its feeder.”

Yearly, the Philippines loses a million metric tons of harvested rice starting from slipshod processing to shabby storage, Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala told the Inquirer. That’s double what we bought abroad this year. The country imported 860,000 tons in 2011.

Losses in cabbage can exceed a third of the harvest, research by the University of the Philippines in Los Baños reveals. Spoilage for bananas spirals to 35 percent. In fisheries, losses amounted to 40 percent. Worldwide, fish spoilage exceeds 11 million tons yearly.

“To the ruler, the people are heaven,” an Asian proverb says.

“To the people, food is heaven.” In Jakarta last July, an Asean and UN Industrial Organization workshop presented data documenting that rodents crunched through “the equivalent of food that 225 million Asians consume in a year.”  The price tag for annual postharvest losses is $5 billion.

“People have started to equate throwing away food with throwing away cash,” Sarah Nassauer wrote in Wall Street Journal. “With food prices high, there’s guilt about waste but dread of the reheated dinner… But there is life with leftovers”—which she detailed.

Each American “throws away about 400 pounds of food a year”—about “the weight of an adult male gorilla.” An average US family of four spends $500 to $2,000 each year on food that ends up in the garbage. In 2010, discarded food—33 million tons—made up the largest component in landfills and incinerators, reports the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“Food waste worldwide accounts for a third of all food production,” British Broadcasting Corp. notes. Recovering what is frittered away is essential. But much bigger agricultural investments are also needed. “If these fail to materialize, the consequences will be devastating.”

We have little wiggle room. Food reserves have been drawn down: rice by more than 40 percent, wheat by almost a third, and corn by half. “Even in a good year, we just about produce enough food to meet consumption needs.”

India had a “dry” monsoon. The United States is emerging from the worst drought in half a century. Vast stretches of Russia are still parched. So was much of South America. “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,” as Eliza Doolittle crooned in “My Fair Lady.”

Harvests shriveled as a result, stalling the welcome easing of food prices. “The situation does not look as bad as 2008 when food riots erupted in 12 countries,” the FAO’s Abdolreza Abbassian notes. That turmoil did leave “people a little oversensitive.”

Still, prices remain at historically high levels. Nor will they dip anytime soon. High energy costs prop up prices.  “We will need to produce 70 percent more food, by 2050, to feed the world’s expanding population,” Worldwatch Institute projects.

Overall population growth continues from the momentum of earlier rapid growth, although fertility has slumped. The 1940 census tallied 19 million Filipinos. Come 2020, the population will surge to 111.7 million, the National Statistical Coordination Board projects.

That’s a fivefold increase. Every one, however, is entitled to adequate food. “To the hungry child, you cannot say tomorrow. His name is today.”

The world, meanwhile, is warming. Arctic ice sheets are thinning even as Antarctic snow thickens. Severe droughts carom into severe floods, then back, affecting rainfall—and harvests.

Factor in what is lost after reaping. Rodents, insects, sheer carelessness take a toll along the chain—from drying, processing, storage, to packaging for grocery shelves and dinner plates. Losses oscillate anywhere between 10 percent and a high of 40 percent.

Up to 16 percent of rice is lost in cutting, handling, threshing, and cleaning, mostly  by hand,  the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños estimates. Another 5-21 percent disappears in drying, storage, milling and processing.

The FAO crunches out similar estimates of rice loss in Southeast Asian countries. Vietnam, for example, can lose 25 percent under typical conditions.

“For now, I ask no more than the justice of eating,” wrote Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda. So more can eat, Secretary Alcala urged the private sector to invest in dryers, mills, and silos to reduce waste. Is anybody listening?

In 2011, the pork barrel crested at P19.5 billion. Each senator got P200 million, and P70 million was   ladled to every congressman (Senators Joker Arroyo and Panfilo Lacson have refused pork slabs over the last decade). How much of that went to tamp down postharvest losses?

Local governments are the closest to artisanal fishermen. Any province-sponsored innovative projects, like wooden barrels for brine treatment developed by the College of Fisheries in UP Visayas?

As many as 5,000 ate and were filled by five loaves and two fish, shared by a young boy, and multiplied by the Galilean.

“Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost,” the Master told his disciples. And they “filled 12 baskets.”

(E-mail: [email protected])