India and Japan should add food waste to the agenda as their economic ties deepen, argue Afsheen Rizvi and V Sujatha in a column for Down To Earth. The views are the writers' own.
Their starting point is India's paradox. According to the UN Environment Programme's Food Waste Index Report 2024, India generates an estimated 78 million to 80 million tonnes of food waste a year, worth about Rs 1.55 lakh crore, while the 2025 Global Hunger Index ranked it 102nd of 123 countries, in the "serious" category, with a child-wasting rate of 18.7%.
Japan, they write, is the only country to have met the UN target of halving food loss (SDG 12.3), seven years early: by 2023 it had cut total food loss by 53% from 2000 levels, 58% for businesses and 46% for households. Its convenience retail generates large surpluses, through over-ordering and the informal "one-third rule" that pulls products well before expiry, but laws mandating recycling and reporting, reliable data and a network of food banks route that surplus to people in need before it becomes waste.
Culture helps too: the idea of mottainai, regret at wasting something useful, and campaigns such as Temaedori that ask shoppers to take items from the front of the shelf. In Yamanashi prefecture, the writers saw food banks tied into local welfare under a 2013 law; Foodbank Yamanashi's Lachic programme pairs food with vocational training for single mothers.
India's food retail is still dominated by kirana stores, but modern retail and online grocery are growing in cities, and the writers say this is the moment to build donation channels in, rather than retrofit them. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India supports food recovery and food banks already operate, but what is missing, they argue, is a framework: measurement and reporting of waste by large businesses, formal links between food banks and welfare services, and sustained public campaigns.
Photo: 円周率３パーセント (Second Harvest food bank, Nagoya) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Down To Earth
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