The £20bn food mountain: Britons throw away half of the food produced each year

Britain is throwing away half of all the food produced on farms, according to the starkest estimate yet of the amount of edible produce we waste.

About 20m tons of food is thrown out each year: equivalent to half of the food import needs for the whole of Africa. Some 16m tons of this is wasted in homes, shops, restaurants, hotels and food manufacturing. Much of the rest is thought to be destroyed between the farm field and the shop shelf.

The total bill to the nation is estimated to be more than £20bn. The issue has come to the fore as supermarkets fight off criticism over billions of plastic carrier bags handed out free each year.

Lord Haskins of Skidby, a former government adviser on rural affairs and chairman of Northern Foods, said yesterday that tackling the mountain of food wasted in this country every year would help to preserve the environment and go some way towards feeding an expanding global population in the face of unprecedented food shortages.

In a move that illustrated the problem last week, Japan pledged more than 300m yen in food aid for Burundi, in Africa, where malnutrition runs at 44 per cent. The food thrown away in the UK last year would meet the equivalent of Burundi's shortages more than 40 times over.

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