Our country wastes more than 30 million people's food rations every year.

How serious is the phenomenon of food waste in China? A popular saying is that the amount of food wasted in China every year is almost equivalent to the annual food rations of 200 million people. The Food and Beverage Association conservatively estimates that China's catering industry produced at least 210 billion yuan of food waste in 2010. However, according to a survey conducted by the Research Group of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 2013 to 2015, China's food waste is about 17 million to 18 million tons per year, equivalent to 30 million to 50 million people's annual food rations.

"We conducted more than 100 days of research in Beijing, Shanghai, Lhasa and Chengdu, including 366 restaurants, 6983 table samples, more than 750person interviews, 7482 consumer questionnaires, and weighing more than 32000 dishes. Weighing more than 100000 times." On November 26, at the "International Symposium on reducing Food waste-Sustainable Food supply chain and Consumer Multi-platform" co-sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme, the China Environmental Protection Federation and other units in Beijing, Cheng Shengkui, a researcher at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced to reporters the achievements of his national research project on food waste.

At present, the food crisis and the phenomenon of food waste have attracted worldwide attention. "as our food source, agriculture uses 70% of fresh water and 30% of global energy, takes up 33% of the land and produces 20% of greenhouse gases. Even so, 1/9 of the world's population does not have adequate food supply. " Said Yu Xin, commissioner for sustainable agriculture and food at the World wide Fund for Nature.

"Human beings have been doing addition, using technological innovation, greater use of fossil energy and other factors to meet the growing demand." Yu Xin said that this has also brought about problems such as soil degradation, water shortage and environmental pollution. "if it continues at the current rate, we may need two Earths by 2030."

The flip side of the story is that 1/3 of the world's food is wasted. "about 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted in all aspects of the food supply chain, which is equivalent to 1.4 billion hectares of land put into agricultural production and 250 billion cubic meters of surface and groundwater wasted each year." Xu Jie, deputy director of the Department of International Cooperation of the Ministry of Science and Technology, said.

"Why does the United Nations Environment Programme attach so much importance to the problem of food waste? Waste accounts for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. " Said JamesLomax, a representative of the United Nations Environment Programme. "at the same time, how to deal with wasted food also puts a lot of pressure on the environment." Yu Xin called on, "We can't just add, but we need to do more subtraction on food waste."

To that end, the 12th goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development goals provides for halving global per capita food waste in retail and consumption by 2030 and reducing food losses in production and supply, including post-harvest losses. In 2014, the EU launched the Horizon 2020 Project and set up the "REFRESH" project in 2015 to achieve the goal of reducing food waste by 30 per cent by 2025. In Asia, Japan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos and other countries have also successfully carried out food education, "zero hunger" campaign and so on.

In China, in addition to the famous "CD-ROM Action", the research results of the top team of the Institute of Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences are also playing a positive role in reducing food waste in our country. Their survey found that the per capita food waste of garden meals in primary and secondary schools reached 89.94 grams, which was not only much higher than that of university canteens and staff canteens, but also higher than the average level of the catering industry.

According to this situation, the consultation report submitted by Cheng Shengkui's team has received great attention and promoted a series of educational activities among primary and secondary school students in Beijing, such as going deep into the fields and cooking personally. In September this year, the International Department of the second Middle School affiliated to Beijing normal University became the first stop of the campus activity "reducing Food waste, We are in Action" jointly launched by the China Environmental Protection Federation and the representative office of the Swedish Institute of Environmental Sciences in China.