Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year -  approximately 1.3 billion tonnes  - gets lost or wasted, UAE’s HRH Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein said on the occasion of World Food Day

Statistics such as this underline the fact that most of us take the food we eat for granted, Princess Haya said in an Open Editorial.

Many of us around the world are completely and utterly unaware that basic food is a precious commodity for an astonishing 800 million people, she observed.

“One in nine people in the world struggle to find a simple meal or any form of good nutrition. Let that sink in. Every single night, 800 million people go to bed weak from having eaten little or nothing that day. And so many of us rarely even think of them,” Princess Haya said.

“The cost of this apathy is that many of the five million of the youngest children who die of disease each year, die simply because they were malnourished. This heart wrenching statistic is only made worse by the fact that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop.

“Hunger is often and quite rightly called ‘the world’s greatest solvable problem.’ We don’t need to look to more biotechnology advances or genetic engineering breakthroughs to feed the hungry – we need more effort,” she added.

“To end world hunger, what we need is simply more ‘heart’ – the ‘heart’ to empathise with the suffering of people; the heart to take action and do what it is needed to bring them relief,” Princess Haya noted. – TradeArabia News Service