Wasting less food

Gordon Brown was right yesterday to talk about the amount of food wasted in Britain, especially at a summit where the western world is again being shamed by its lack of progress in honouring promises to the developing world. The amount of perfectly good food we waste is shameful given the starvation and drought that still plagues so much of Africa in particular.

We throw away over 400 million tonnes of food every year - apparently the equivalent of £420 on every household's annual shopping bill (though how they know this without knowing exactly which food we throw out, and where we got it from escapes me!).

But it's politicians, not the public who must take a lead in reducing food waste, because while most of us could probably buy more sensibly there are two big wasters that need national or international action to rectify.

The first is to scrap the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP): the biggest waster of food there is in Europe. Not only does the CAP encourage - actually demand - inefficient farming practices and scandalous food mountains but it is one of the biggest barriers against free and fair trade in the world. It actively prevents African farmers from competing with their EU counterparts by subsidising inefficient farming methods in the EU at the expense of far cheaper goods from developing nations.

The CAP is unjustifiable, and rather than French President Nicholas Sarkozy spending his time trying to bully Ireland into reversing its referendum vote against the Lisbon Treaty of a few weeks ago, he really should be telling his countrymen straight that there can be no such thing as a free lunch anymore.

The second initiative we need is to persuade the huge supermarket chains to end their "buy one get one free" deals and instead cut the item cost of goods, especially food staples. It's good that some supermarkets are already focussing more on discounting these key items but they can do far more.

Buy one get one free deals (or BOGOFs!) are one of the main reasons why food waste is increasing; they also don't help with Britain's obesity problem as we try to consume the extra freebies we get in our shopping trolley to avoid throwing this unneeded food away.

The more significant figure that emerged from the government's food waste report today was not the tonnage thrown away, or some notional estimate of how much that adds to our weekly shop - it's this: that the wealthiest families spend 7% of their (far larger) household income on food, whereas it consumes more than twice that - 15% - of the poorest.

It isn't, predominantly, the poorest households that waste food: they don't have that luxury and they also shop more carefully. But it is they who will benefit most from a switch to cheaper overall prices away from two-for-one deals, and the cheaper produce we would be able to buy were Europe to scrap the CAP.