Foreign media: China is getting richer but wasting food is becoming more and more serious.

The original title of an article on the Bloomberg Review website on October 15: China needs cleaner plates. The next time you pour leftovers into the trash can, stop and think about China. Between 2010 and 2012, 11.5% of Chinese mainland people were malnourished, but the Chinese still waste more food each year than Americans.

Of course, this is not worth making a fuss. After all, China has four times the population of the United States, and many of them are already in the middle class. In terms of per capita waste, Americans are still far from being compared with the Chinese. But the reality will not stay the same forever: as China gets richer, people are unsurprisingly wasting more food. Anecdotal evidence about the problem abounds. A survey shows that 28.3% of the total meals bought by students are dumped in a university canteen in Wuhan. The situation has become so serious that China launched the CD-ROM Initiative last year.

China's waste problem is not just about affluence. Although China has greatly improved its agricultural infrastructure, in some areas there is still a household-based small-scale peasant economy, which is a widespread waste of food. Farmers usually lack proper and clean dry storage facilities, let alone effective ways to put grain on the market before it goes bad. Grain companies across the country alone lost more than 16 million tons of grain in storage and transportation, officials from the China Grain Administration said last year.

The impact of the above waste is far greater than the failure to satisfy people's hunger. Some analysts estimate that the production of all this wasted food requires about the consumption of agricultural water throughout Canada or Australia. On the other hand, the cultivated land that is wasted in China is roughly the same as the total arable land in Mexico. For Chinese mainland, which is facing severe water shortages, such data should attract the attention of policy makers, environmentalists and consumers.

To be sure, Chinese officials seem to be well aware of the danger of allowing the problem to inflate. This week, Chinese media are launching a new campaign against food waste, promoting the "strict economy and anti-waste" campaign launched by President Xi Jinping 18 months ago.