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THE PARLIAMENTARY REVIEW Highlighting best practice 12 | REVIEW OF THE YEAR An often quoted statistic is that a third of all the food produced in the EU ends up as waste. And a report by the Lords' EU Environment and Agriculture Sub-Committee, published in April 2014, added more stark statistics. The Peers said that 15 million tonnes of food was wasted each year in the UK. This waste amounted to at least £5 billion of lost business. They added that it also had a number of direct consequences for the environment. One was that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with global food waste are equivalent to the emissions generated by all the road transportation in the USA. Another study, Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not, by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers suggested that as much as half of the 4 billion tonnes of food produced each year around the world did not end up in human stomachs. The authors of the report cited a variety of reasons for such high levels of waste, including: 'Inadequate infrastructure and storage facilities through to overly strict sell-by dates, buy-one-get-one free offers and consumers demanding cosmetically perfect food.' The report warned: 'With UN predictions that there could be about an extra three billion people to feed by the end of the century and an increasing pressure on the resources needed to produce food, including land, water and energy, the Institution is calling for urgent action to tackle this waste.' Giving evidence to the Lords' inquiry, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) – whose members account for 93% of the UK groceries market – said progress was being made in a range of areas but there was still more to be done. When asked about retailers' rules on size, shape and blemishes for edible produce, Andrew Opie, the BRC's director of food and sustainability, explained: 'We as an organisation and our members had lobbied in Europe for a complete relaxation of the standards to allow us to sell more of the crop.' But, he added: 'The problem in some ways is that, even if you were to say, "Right, I am going to take the entire crop. Whatever it looks like, I am going to put it on the shelves", what would probably happen is you would just transfer the waste further up the supply chain.' The Lords' report listed a number of actions that the committee felt By the end of the century there will be increasing pressure on the resources needed to produce food, including land, water and energy Food waste As much as half of the 4 billion tonnes of food produced each year around the world did not end up in human stomachs