Countries which waste the most amount of food
Published on: Oct. 4, 2025, 8 a.m. | Source: Times of India
Food waste is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. Every year, billions of tons of food are produced but never eaten. This comes at a staggering cost, not just in money, but also in the resources that go into producing it.Crops require water, land, and energy; when they are wasted, so too are those precious resources. Worse still, discarded food often ends up in landfills, where it releases methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide.According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the world throws away more than $1 trillion worth of food annually, while nearly 783 million people suffer from hunger. Food waste is responsible for 8–10% of global greenhouse gas emissions and consumes about 30% of farmland just to grow food that never gets eaten. On a household level, each person worldwide wastes an average of 132 kilograms of food per year, much of it preventable.To understand the scale of the issue, here are the countries that waste the most food, based on both total volume and per capita figures in 2024.
