IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sek/iacpro/0200895.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Food Waste in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Need for Extension Education Programs to Increase Public Awareness

Author

Listed:
  • KHODRAN AL-ZAHRANI

    (KING SAID UNIVERSITY)

  • MIRZA BAIG

    (KING SAUD UNIVERSITY)

Abstract

Food waste has been recognized all over the world and in Saudi Arabia too as one the prime factors limiting food security. The food is wasted through the entire food chain: by farmers, food industries, retailers, caterers and by consumers. The factors responsible and reasons causing such losses include: lack of awareness, lack of shopping planning, left-overs, and losses in households, restaurants, parties and occasions. Roughly about 40-50 % of all food ready for harvest never reaches to the consumers. According to the US environmental protection agency, food leftovers are the single-largest component of the waste stream. Food waste includes uneaten food and food preparation leftovers from residences or households, restaurants, schools, cafeterias etc. By 2075, the United Nation's mid-range projection for global population growth predicts that human numbers will peak at about 9.5 billion people. This means that there could be an extra three billion mouths to feed by the end of the century. The situation in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is more crucial and difficult for several reasons; firstly the country imports almost all of its food needs. Secondly since 1990, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has been among the countries suffering from severe water shortage. Despite the country is facing an acute scarcity of water resources and witnesses over growing population yet has successfully managed to achieve the self-sufficiency levels in several food commodities. The kingdom spends a significant portion of its budget on importing huge volumes of food commodities and makes them available to its citizens at the highly subsidized rates. Above all, the Saudis as a nation are very hospitable and food lovers. Also the culture in the KSA is based on festivals and huge quantities of food are being served. All these factors lead to a lot of food waste. At the moment, the wastefulness has reached to a level where food is thought to be the number one contributor to the waste in landfills. There is a great need to reduce the food waste in the KSA by adopting different ways, means and strategies. Although complete prevention seems difficult yet food waste can be reduced significantly by increasing public awareness on the food and water situation in the Kingdom through a national comprehensive campaign and vibrant extension education programs.

Suggested Citation

  • Khodran Al-Zahrani & Mirza Baig, 2014. "Food Waste in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Need for Extension Education Programs to Increase Public Awareness," Proceedings of International Academic Conferences 0200895, International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences.
  • Handle: RePEc:sek:iacpro:0200895
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://iises.net/proceedings/10th-international-academic-conference-vienna/table-of-content/detail?cid=2&iid=10&rid=895
    File Function: First version, 2014
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rosa Maria Fanelli & Angela Di Nocera, 2017. "How to implement new educational campaigns against food waste: An analysis of best practices in European Countries," Economia agro-alimentare, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 19(2), pages 223-244.
    2. Mohamad G. Abiad & Lokman I. Meho, 2018. "Food loss and food waste research in the Arab world: a systematic review," Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food, Springer;The International Society for Plant Pathology, vol. 10(2), pages 311-322, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    food waste; imports; subsidies; dietary behaviors; awareness; extension education;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
    • A00 - General Economics and Teaching - - General - - - General
    • A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sek:iacpro:0200895. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klara Cermakova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://iises.net/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.