Many international organisations, including the European Parliament, see reducing food loss and waste as a priority. They argue that this will increase the efficiency of resource use and have beneficial environmental effects. This paper asserts that the scale of the problem has been overstated...

The long-forgotten subject of the ecological disadvantages of the tropics has been brought to the fore once again by the catastrophic droughts in the Sahel and in southern Africa. The naive belief that economic development is simply a matter of finding the right technology and of spreading...