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   The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a new FAO report.
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  Among its key findings: Each year, food that is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of
  water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia's Volga River and is responsible
  for adding 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the planet's atmosphere.
  
  And beyond its environmental impacts, the direct economic consequences to producers
  of food wastage (excluding fish and seafood) run to the tune of $750 billion
  annually, FAO's report estimates.

Fifty-four percent of the world's food wastage occurs "upstream" during production,
post-harvest handling and storage, according to FAO's study. Forty-six percent of
it happens "downstream," at the processing, distribution and consumption stages.

As a general trend, developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production,
while food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher in middle- and high-income regions -- where it accounts for 31-39 percent of total wastage -- than in low-income regions (4-16 percent).