“All the world's nearly one billion hungry people could be
lifted out of malnourishment on less than a quarter of the food that is wasted
in the US, UK and Europe,” says Feeding the 5,000, a campaign group which is
pioneering food recycling.
Tesco – the UK’s largest supermarket – admits that 28,500
tonnes of food waste were generated in its stores and distribution centres in
just six months. And this is only part of the 15 million tonnes of food which
is thrown away in the UK each year.
Is this a new and startling reality?
Well, yes and no. Years ago, I remember a speaker from the UN’s
Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) explaining to pupils at my school that
it was totally possible to feed all the hungry mouths on the planet with
existing resources.
So the bigger question is why is that instead of such an
elemental problem being solved, in the age of super technology, humanity is
still struggling with it?
Campaigners are trying to get supermarkets to revise their
attitudes to their products – such as sending food past its “best-by” dates to
charities and food banks.
That seems sensible, but relying on corporations for whom
food is a commodity to be sold for a profit can’t solve the problem, which goes
deeper than how food is marketed and sold.
At a basic level, we are alienated from the very substances
that keep us alive. Instead of seeing the lettuce leaves, apples, meat, fish
and bread as precious products developed from nature by our fellow human
beings, most see them as little more than useful commodities.
We have long lost the connection with the land and soil on
which they grow and the people who tend the crops. We prefer not to think about
how “free range” eggs are collected by cheap labour or how animals are kept and
slaughtered.
We don’t think about the end destination of plastic,
polystyrene and packaging used to attract children to dangerous sweets and to
make us buy more and more.
Felix Preston, in a briefing paper produced for the Chatham
House think tank, calls for “a fundamentally new model of industrial
organisation”. He proposes a “circular economy” or “CE”.
Instead of seeing “waste” as something simply to be
discarded, a circular economy would “transform the function of resources in the
economy”. These proposals chime in with the aim of a zero waste approach now
advocated by some municipal authorities and governments as well as ecological
campaigners.
Of course, the hope is that corporate capitalism will adopt
the circular economy approach because it is good for business. CE would “offer
huge business opportunities”, according to its supporters.
But what is needed is something different. The for-profit
market-growth model must always prioritise its shareholder returns. Yes, some
capitalists are much more far seeing than others. Yes, they may even believe
the greenwash they churn out through their clever publicists.
But as the recent scandal with egg production in the UK shows, the bottom
line for most companies is that they want to maximise their profits.
Preston’s proposals, he says, “requires systemic changes
that go beyond the individual firm. They must be embedded in partnerships and
networks of companies”, and would require a collaborative, information-sharing
approach.
This is definitely not possible within the capitalist
framework of production and exchange, driven by market share and maximising
dividends.
Resolving the problem of waste is indeed
possible. It makes the transition from a for-profit capitalist economy to a
co-operative, collaborative, shared-ownership system more urgent than ever.
One of the greatest scourges of humanity - hunger and malnutrition – could be overcome
if humanity could open up an alternative path where eating, like heating, comes
before profit.
Corinna Lotz
Useful links: http://www.thinkeatsave.org/
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