The World Food Day is celebrated on 16 October.
In 1900, one farmer could feed four people. In 2012, one farmer fed as many as 129 people. How to produce enough food is a global issue which concerns us all, and that is why every year the 16 October is marked as the World Food Day, reports Poslovni.hr on October 16, 2017.
Due to factors such as urbanisation, soil erosion, desertification and climate change, the area of cultivated land is decreasing, while global population continues to grow. By 2050, the world population is expected to gain additional three billion people. At the same time, it is expected that the agricultural surface area per capita will be reduced by about 17 percent, which means that we will have to produce more food than we currently do on less land than we have now. Food production will have to increase by 60 percent by 2050 in order for all people to have enough food.
At the same time, the World Food Day is also bringing forward issues of uneven distribution of food in the world, as well as the need to raise awareness about the issue of unused food. A third of all the produced food in the world, enough to feed three billion people a year, is thrown away during the production process or finishes in garbage cans.
Croatia is not an exception in this statistics, annually throwing away about 380,000 tons of healthy food.
Small farmers play a major role in the world’s food production since as much as 50 percent of the total food production in the world is produced by small farmers. Their numbers in Croatia are also substantial: over 80 percent of agricultural plots in Croatia are smaller than 10 hectares.
The issue of throwing away healthy food has recently been in focus in Croatia due to the ever-growing number of people who use food banks organised by charitable organisations. However, the food banks face major problems in finding enough food to distribute to their users, while at the same time supermarkets throw away large quantities of unsold food at the end of each workday. The government recently freed food bank donations from having to pay the value-added tax, but the donated amounts are still not nearly enough to feed all those who need them.
Translated from Poslovni.hr
