Lost food, wasted resources: global food supply chain losses and their impacts on freshwater, cropland, and fertiliser use

Reducing food losses and waste is considered to be one of the most promising measures to improve food security in the coming decades. Food losses also affect our use of resources, such as freshwater, cropland, and fertilisers. In this paper we estimate the global food supply losses due to lost and wasted food crops, and the resources used to produce them. We also quantify the potential food supply and resource savings that could be made by reducing food losses and waste. We used publically available global databases to conduct the study at the country level.We found that around one quarter of the produced food supply (614kcal/cap/day) is lost within the food supply chain (FSC). The production of these lost and wasted food crops accounts for 24% of total freshwater resources used in food crop production (27m