'Just staggering': UN says households waste 1 bn meals a day

Paris: Households around the world threw away one billion meals every single day in 2022 in what the United Nations on Wednesday called a global trag...

Paris: Households around the world threw away one billion meals every single day in 2022 in what the United Nations on Wednesday called a "global tragedy" of food waste.

More than $1 trillion worth of food was binned by households and businesses at a time when nearly 800 million people were going hungry, the UN's latest Food Waste Index Report says.

It said that more than 1 billion tonnes of food -- almost one fifth of all the produce available on the market -- was wasted in 2022, most of it by households.

"Food waste is a global tragedy. Millions will go hungry today as food is wasted across the world," Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said in a statement.

Such wastage was not just a moral but "environmental failure", the report said.