Poor countries also wasting tons of food

The fact that a huge amount of food is wasted each year will be no surprise to anybody in the West. What might come as a surprise is that a large percentage of global food waste occurs in developing countries, primarily because of poor infrastructure and dysfunctional distribution networks.

As much as half of the food grown or produced in the developing world simply never makes it to market. And that loss is costing billions of dollars and blighting countless lives.

That's one of the issues raised in the book Food Foolish: The Hidden Connection Between Food Waste, Hunger and Climate Change by John Mandyck and Eric Schultz. Mandyck, who's the chief sustainability officer at United Technologies Building & Industrial Systems, and Schultz detail the causes and consequences of the $1 trillion mountain of food that is wasted around the world each year.

In the developing world, says Mandyck, some fixes can be as simple as getting farmers in places like Kenya to use crates instead of burlap bags to transport their tomatoes to prevent them from bruising on the way to market. In Afghanistan, a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization project to provide farmers with grain silos, made by local tinsmiths, reduced losses to insects and rot from 20 percent to less than 2 percent. In Nigeria, a program that provided the millions of small farms with access to loans, seeds, fertilizer, warehouses and transportation saw maize yields triple and put money in the pockets of farmers.

Click here to read the interview with Mandyck by NPR.