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Kaan Sidar: Food waste is an unacceptable luxury!

Calling for collective action on International Food Loss and Waste Awareness Day, TÜGİS stated that food waste is an ‘unacceptable luxury’ in today’s world where hunger and malnutrition are serious problems.

Kaan Sidar

Kaan Sidar, President of the Turkish Food Employers’ Association (TÜGİS), who made statements on the occasion of the International Food Loss and Waste Awareness Day, which was declared by the UN in 2019 to draw attention to the damages caused by food loss and waste to the economy and the environment and to raise awareness on the basis of individuals and states, said that preventing food waste is critical for a sustainable future.

12 million bread goes to waste every day!

Highlighting that both sector stakeholders and consumers have a great responsibility in preventing food waste, Sidar emphasised that it is a big problem that 12 million loaves of bread go to waste every day in Türkiye and 30 percent of the food produced in the world is wasted before it reaches the shelf.

“Food waste is an unacceptable luxury in a world where hunger and malnutrition are serious problems. Today, if only a quarter of the food lost or wasted on a global scale could be saved, approximately 1 billion people struggling with hunger in the world could be fed. In this direction, it is of great importance to use existing food resources more efficiently and to review our consumption habits,” Sidar said.

Bread waste

Call for collective action!

Pointing out that challenging periods such as pandemics, economic crises and natural disasters have repeatedly shown the critical importance of the processes from food production to supply, Kaan Sidar noted, “The concept of sustainability should be addressed with a holistic approach in the field of food. While calling for collective action in this context, we should come together as all stakeholders, from government representatives to industrialists, from industry leaders to farmers, from academics to non-governmental organisations and take initiatives together against food waste.”

Reminding that the Turkish food industry meets the basic needs of citizens without any problems by not disrupting the food supply with its self-sacrificing efforts despite all the difficulties, Sidar added, “We carry out awareness raising activities in cooperation with our local and international stakeholders and continue to support our members’ projects for food waste.”

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