Next Christmas, let’s do more to feed the world’s hungry

It’s the time of the year when the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” makes its rounds on the airwaves. Band Aid, a group of music stars, produced this poignant song in 1984 about the famine in Ethiopia. The crisis was caused by a combination of drought, conflict and economic instability, affecting millions of people living in rural Ethiopia and exposing the consequences of inadequate infrastructure, ineffective government and international neglect of developing nations.

Not much has much changed in the years since. According to the World Food Programme, nearly 350 million people across the globe still suffer from severe hunger, with 49 million on the brink of famine. Conflict is the leading cause as it destroys supply chains bringing food to populations, but climate change excesses also contribute to crop failures through drought, flooding and extreme temperatures.

Yet, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, we can produce more than enough food to feed everyone in the world. The problem lies both in the inability to get the food to starving populations as well as our profligate wastage of food, with about 30 per cent – or about 1.3 billion tons – of food produced for human consumption wasted or lost each year.

Hong Kong is a good example of where this is happening. More than 10,800 tons of municipal waste were disposed of each day in 2023, of which nearly 30 per cent was food waste. A large amount of this waste comes from commercial sources such as restaurants, hotels, wet markets, food production and processing industries. Yet according to the Hong Kong Council for Social Service, around 71,000 low-income households in the city are unable to meet their basic nutritional needs, with some surviving on less than HK$15 (US$2) per meal per person.

So how do we square the dual problem of edible food not reaching deprived households and the mounds of wasted food that ends up in landfills? Non-governmental organisations such as Feeding Hong Kong, Foodlink Foundation and Food Angel have applied different delivery models to salvage edible food and distribute it to the needy. This is not enough, though, and more has to be done to institutionalise this effort so an efficient ecosystem links up the supply and demand for nutritious food.

This would involve scaling up logistics chains and food centres to collect and distribute the food, ostensibly through better use of data enabled by digital technology. Ideally, the same technology could be used by the retail sector to manage how much food to serve to customers and what to do with leftovers, whether they are donated to feed the poor or put to other uses.

  

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