Food Waste And Fracking Essay

Food waste and fracking share many of the same economic effects. Food waste amounts to roughly US$ 680 billion in industrialized countries and US$ 310 billion in developing countries. Food losses during harvest and in storage translate into lost income for small farmers and into higher prices for poor consumers. The amount of food lost can adversely affect the small farmers because the amount of produce that each harvest brings, in comparison to the bigger farms, is much smaller. So, every piece of produce that is misplaced or wasted means much more to the farmer of a smaller farm, then to the owner of workers of a larger farm. The losses caused by the food waste can make the effort and resources needed to create the produce outnumber the benefits. Oftentimes, the cost of labor to harvest a crop exceeds the value of selling for small farms. In addition, there is also the cycle of inflation and deflation which can take place, which can also make it harder for farms to profit from the produce they grow. Farmers will leave entire blocks of fruit or vegetables in orchards and fields for fear of flooding the market and depressing prices. (World Resources …show more content…
the vast quantities of fuel, agricultural chemicals, water, land, and labor needed to produce it. Let’s bring the example of a typical lunch. A loaf of bread requires about 240 gallons of water, and a pound of cheese takes about 382 gallons. So, a simple cheese sandwich takes about 56 gallons of water. Throw in a small bag of potato chips at 12 gallons and you just ate about 68 gallons of water Produced but uneaten food occupies almost 1.4 billion hectares of land; representing nearly 30 percent of the world’s agricultural land area. (The Scientific American) All this water is wasted. Obviously, wasting all these resources isn’t profitable for the country’s