Eat, love, waste 1,3bn tons of food a year

The problem is considerably bigger than just Ethiopia. According to the UN Environment Programme, 20,000 children under the age of five die from hunger every day.

And about 870m people around the world are classified as under-nourished.

Yet 1.3bn tons of food is wasted every year, equivalent to the total amount of food produced in sub-Saharan Africa. The waste has a devastating effect on the environment.

Thursday (6 June) was World Environment Day and the theme adopted for this was "Think. Eat. Save".

"If food is wasted, it means that all the resources used in the production of the food are also lost. For example, it takes about 1,000 litres of water to produce a litre of milk, and about 16,000 litres goes into a cow's food to make a hamburger," reads a statement by the UN Environment Programme.

"The resulting greenhouse gas emissions from the cows themselves and throughout the food supply chain, all end up in being wasted when we food is not consumed," it said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Kimoon said in developed nations food dumped by households, retailers and catering companies rots on landfills, releasing "significant quantities of methane" into the air.

Nathalie Leblond, a manager at pest control company Rentokil-Initial, said often food goes to waste before it reaches the consumer, because of pests.

She said it is important to have a pest management programme to ensure that "rodents, cockroaches or flies do not contaminate the production line with skin, hair, faeces or transmitted bacteria".

Peter Arnold, director for food merchandise at Pick n Pay, said the chain redistributes surplus food safe for human consumption to Foodbank, a charity organisation.

Research by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research has found that more than 9m tons of food, or 177kg per person, is wasted in South Africa every year at a cost of R61.5-billion each year.

"At the same time, 70% of poor urban households in South Africa live in conditions of food insecurity," the council said.