IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/iamopb/7e.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Discarding food vs. starving people: Inefficient and immoral?

Author

Listed:
  • Koester, Ulrich

Abstract

Intensive discussions about discarding food in recent weeks were prompted by a study commissioned by the German Bundestag and supported by the German Federal Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection. Spiegel online said on March 13, 2012: Europe's waste would suffice twice to feed the world's hungry. This statement startled many people. Food is discarded in Europe and other prosperous countries while many people in poor countries are starving. Hence, it seems that the global hunger problem could be easily solved. People in rich countries would simply have to deal with food more responsibly. This policy brief critically examines the methodology of identification food loss and the magnitude of estimated quantities and values. Furthermore, it is questioned whether the potential reduction of food loss on one side can really decrease hunger on the other. The paper concludes with a discussion of morals and alternative options for combating hunger.

Suggested Citation

  • Koester, Ulrich, 2012. "Discarding food vs. starving people: Inefficient and immoral?," IAMO Policy Briefs 7e, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:iamopb:7e
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/70792/1/738572233.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    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:zbw:iamopb:7e. 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: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iamoode.html .

    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.