Hungary is at the forefront of the fight against food waste

The Minister highlighted at the conference that the global objective of agriculture is to provide consumers with high-quality, affordable products, while also ensuring the competitiveness and livelihood of farmers. Regulations affecting food and the food industry, as well as the reduction of food waste, require special attention. In developed countries, more than half of the food thrown away is generated in households. Recognizing this, in Hungary, the National Food Chain Safety Office launched the “Without Residue” program in 2016. The period that has passed since then has proven the success of the initiative, as we were able to reduce food waste per capita by more than a third. Our country, in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, will continue to provide special support to the program in the coming years. Our ambitious but achievable initiative is to halve the amount of food waste generated in Hungarian households by 2030. This effort also applies to waste generated in retail and other stages of the food chain, the minister pointed out.

He explained that the development of packaging technologies offers further opportunities to avoid losses, but the current annual household waste of approximately 205 thousand tons is still a huge challenge. This amount of food would be enough to feed 380 thousand people for one year, and represents a loss of several hundred billion forints at the societal level. In order to achieve our goals, consumer education is the most important thing. We need to raise people’s awareness of conscious shopping, proper food storage, and the use of leftovers, he added.

István Nagy also mentioned that one of the key areas of adaptation to climate change is water retention, and farmers can increase this ability in several ways. He mentioned winter mulching, the designation of non-productive areas, i.e. the maintenance of non-productive landscape elements and areas corresponding to 10 percent of arable land or a combination thereof, and the use of microbiological, soil and plant conditioning products. Non-rotation tillage is also an effective means of keeping water in the landscape, the head of the Ministry of Agriculture emphasized.