Waste in a time of want

A farmer harvested 84 sacks of palay from his field.

He lost three after hampasan or threshing, and another eight because he didn’t have adequate drying facilities and mainly relied on roadside drying. Seven sacks were spoiled because of mold growth, pest infestations and grain discoloration after it rained continuously for three days.

During hauling, the farmer lost six sacks due to physical spillage from torn or poorly tied sacks, rough handling, and grain scattering during transport over bumpy rural roads. During milling, he lost another three because of inefficient, single-pass milling machines or kiskisan, which also shatter improperly dried bigas into powder or smaller grains.

Elsewhere, Filipino households throw away an average of 50 grams of cooked rice per meal from plates and dining tables.

The harvest was good. Yet only 57 sacks remained of the 84 post-harvest due to inadequate and ineffective infrastructure and poor logistics. So the farmer brought home less money, and his family shared a smaller meal.

“Kung sagana ang ani, bakit kapos pa rin ang hapag?” (If the harvest is bountiful, why is the table still lacking?) he asked.

Nothing unusual happened. And that is what should disturb us.

On 29 September, the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste asks us to face an uncomfortable contradiction: while many people do not have enough to eat, food is lost or discarded at every stage from farm to table.

The contradiction is present in the Philippines. The 2023 National Nutrition Survey found that average household plate waste had risen to 130 grams a day, 53 grams more than in 2018 to 2019, with rice, vegetables and fish among the foods most often wasted. In the same year, official poverty statistics placed 4.84 million Filipinos below the food threshold, their incomes insufficient even for basic food needs.

Waste and want, together.

When food is wasted in a time of want, something is wrong. Something terribly wrong.

Our usual response is to tell people to waste less, and that is necessary. Education can teach us to plan meals, store food properly, understand labels, serve only what we can finish and find another use for what remains. Those who have choices must learn to exercise them responsibly.

But education must not become accusation, because not everyone has the same room to act. The farmer cannot preserve a harvest without storage. The vendor cannot save produce without refrigeration or another market. A family without a refrigerator cannot keep food safely for long.

People should be helped to choose better. We cannot condemn those for whom the better choice is unavailable, impractical or unaffordable.

Food loss and food waste are also not quite the same. Some food is lost before consumers ever see it because transport, storage, processing and markets fail; some is wasted by retailers, restaurants and households. Responsibility runs through the whole chain, but it does not fall equally on every hand that touches the food.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has made food security a national priority. That priority cannot end with producing more. It must also mean protecting what farmers produce, moving it efficiently, making nutritious food accessible, rescuing what remains safe to eat and returning unavoidable organic waste to productive use.

Our National Adaptation Plan recognizes how droughts, floods and other climate pressures threaten food systems, while our climate commitments address both agriculture and waste. These concerns meet on every plate, because when a crop is lost, so are the water, soil, energy, labor and hope invested in growing it.

The damage goes deeper than an overflowing landfill. A system that makes waste ordinary slowly changes our relationship with the sources of life: food becomes disposable, labor becomes invisible, and nature becomes something we extract from, use and discard.

That is damage to our human ecology, to the relationship among people, community and the natural world that sustains both.

A society eventually becomes what its systems repeatedly ask its people to do. If waste is easier than recovery, disposal cheaper than preservation, and survival more urgent than foresight, our habits will follow the choices before us.

This is ultimately a question about development. Are we building a country that expands people’s choices while protecting the foundations of life? Or are we producing more, consuming more and leaving both people and nature poorer?

The answer will not be found only in how much food we grow. It will be found in how much food reaches a table, how fairly it is shared and how little is treated as worthless along the way.

Of the farmer’s 10 baskets, six never nourished anyone. We should not accept that as the ordinary cost of feeding a nation.

The farmer’s harvest should not end at the field or the market. Or worse, somewhere between the field and the market. Only when it nourishes life does the harvest fulfill its purpose, and the farmer’s labor finds its meaning.