Food is necessary for survival. But something so essential often isn’t treated as such.

A policy brief released Aug. 21 by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) estimates that up to half of the world’s food produced is being wasted.

The SIWI released the brief along with the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). All of which are urging governments, institutions and other organizations to curb food wastage.

“To meet the challenge of feeding growing populations and the global hungry, massive reductions in the amount of food wasted after production are needed,” according to the SIWI report.

The 36-page brief says that wasted food occurs during various levels of production and consumption.

The brief describes that this can occur when farmers produce more food than necessary or when consumers overeat or throw out food, as well as poor storage and transportation.

Along with the wastage, people are being malnourished while others are becoming obese and the efficiency in food production industry is not reaching its potential.

“Globally, there are roughly 50 percent more people who are overweight and obese (1.2 billion) than there are malnourished (860 million),” the SIWI report says.

According to the brief, the global impact of food wastage can be felt in this imbalance. While the number of people who are well-fed outnumber the people underfed it is still an issue because while these people are hungry while food is being overeaten, thrown out and rotting in fields.

Sustainable Worlds Professor Dan Childers says that this finding surprised him and in his opinion, overeating is an issue of food wastage.

“If you’re eating more than you need, than you are wasting food, in my opinion,” Childers says.

Childers also says that food wastage is a complex issue because there are so many levels and aspects to the production of food, such as economic and social factors.

Kinesiology sophomore Alexander Newsham is a supervisor at a local Starbucks. He says food sold at the store has to be thrown out every few days even if it hasn’t even gone bad. This is because of the pre-marked shelf life of 1-4 days depending on the type of food.

“It’s to keep things fresh. A lot of the food we have will expire one or two days after the mark-out date,” Newsham says.

Newsham says sometimes employees will volunteer to take expired food items or expired pastries will be donated to local organizations if they come and pick them up — which doesn’t always happen.

This is an example of both economic and social factors that lead to the wasting of food while others are not being fed.

Professor Hallie Eakin, who also teaches Sustainable Worlds, says another issue with food being wasted while people go hungry is not the lack of food but the allocation of it.

“Food access is really the problem rather than food supply,” Eakin says.

Eakin, who has researched small farming operations in Mexico, says that sometimes farmers are faced with problems where food is thrown out or entire crops are wasted when there is no market demand.

“Farmers need to get ripe food out and the window of opportunity is very narrow,” Eakin says.

Eakin says farmers may have 10 days to harvest and the market only wants a certain size of produce or the price will be too low so it’s not worth harvesting.

“[Farmers] may decide it’s just not worth it, and just let it rot in the field,” Eakin says.

Eakin says farmers try and make the most of their crops. She says sometimes food will be degraded into compost or used to feed livestock.

“Farmers try and do the best they can because it’s a substantial loss for them when they can’t harvest,”Eakin says.

Both Childers and Eakin say that part of the problem is big business agriculture.

Eakin says when the power is consolidated in large supermarkets and food chains that it narrows to options for smaller farmers.

“So one of the issues of sustainability is that not only consumers have access, but producers also have a diversity of channels that farmers can sell their products,” Eakin says.

This is part of the SIWI’s series of solutions to curb food loss. Along with more support for farmers, the brief calls for more efficiency in all areas of production.

The brief calls for innovation and improved harvesting technologies, better transportation and storage as well as consumers doing their part not to throw out or overeat food.

The brief suggests that with the combined efforts of many, wastage could be cut down considerably by the year 2025.

“A consortium of policy makers, representatives from industry, academia and civil society could lead the way to design effective, acceptable and practical actions to reduce the losses and wastage by half by 2025,” according to the SIWI report.

Reach the reporter at nicole.ethier@asu.edu.