«Presque la moitié de la nourriture mondiale serait gaspillée«. Con este llamativo y, de confirmarse, dramático titular resumía el 10 de enero de 2013 en su blog de Le Monde Audrey Garric la terrible paradoja de un planeta con 860 millones de personas malnutridas, 7 mil y pico millones de habitantes y, sin cambios bruscos de tendencia, 2.500 millones más a finales de siglo, y derrochando la mitad de todos los alimentos: entre el 30% y el 40% de los 4.000 millones de toneladas de alimentos que se producen, aproximadamente, cada año.
En cause : des dates de péremption inutilement strictes, des promotions «deux pour le prix d’un», l’exigence des consommateurs occidentaux pour des produits alimentaires esthétiquement parfaits, ainsi que des mauvaises pratiques agricoles, des infrastructures inadaptées et des lieu de stockage peu performants.
Dans les pays en développement, les pertes de nourriture ont lieu au début de la chaîne d’approvisionnement, entre le champ et le marché, du fait de récoltes inefficaces, d’infrastructures de transport locales inadéquates ou de conditions de stockage inappropriées.
La información de Garric se basa en el informe GLOBAL FOOD WASTE NOT, WANT NOT, de la Institution of Mechanical Engineers, con el siguiente subtítulo: «Feeding the 9 billion: The tragedy of waste. 
By 2075, the United Nations’ mid-range projection for global population growth predicts that human numbers will peak at about 9.5 billion people. This means that there could be an extra three billion mouths to feed by the end of the century, a period in which substantial changes are anticipated in the wealth, calorific intake and dietary preferences of people in developing countries across the world.
Such a projection presents mankind with wide-ranging social, economic, environmental and political issues that need to be addressed today to ensure a sustainable future for all. One key issue is how to produce more food in a world of finite resources.
Today, we produce about four billion metric tonnes of food per annum. Yet due to poor practices in harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, it is estimated that 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach. Furthermore, this figure does not reflect the fact that large amounts of land, energy, fertilisers and water have also been lost in the production of foodstuffs which simply end up as waste. This level of wastage is a tragedy that cannot continue if we are to succeed in the challenge of sustainably meeting our future food demands.