One third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted‚ the Consumer Goods Forum Annual Global Summit being held in Cape Town heard on Wednesday.

This amounts to 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year with an estimated value of US$1 trillion.

“According to United Nations FAO‚ the 1.3 billion tonnes of food loss and waste negatively impacts the ability to feed a growing population and the nearly 800 million people that go hungry every day‚” Enactus board member and Brambles Limited CEO Tom Gorman said.

This food loss and waste also resulted in 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted into the planet’s atmosphere per year. If food waste was a country‚ it would be the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases globally after China and the US‚ Gorman quoted the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) as saying in a report.

Gorman on Wednesday announced announced the launch of a global initiative‚ 1 Race 2 End Waste‚ to reduce food loss and waste in developing as well as developed countries.

Enactus is an international Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) dedicated to inspiring students to improve the world through entrepreneurial action. Brambles is a supply-chain logistics company operating in more than 60 countries‚ primarily through the CHEP and IFCO brands.

 During the summit‚ the UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) and the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to signal their commitment to a large-scale partnership for food safety.

 The partnership solidified on Wednesday sets out to harness the vast experience and knowledge of both global organisations in order to implement “a roadmap for scaling up” by developing large-scale food safety capability building projects in a number of key regions in the global food supply network‚ the organisations said.