Global Food System Sankey

Food losses and food waste has been addressed in a number of scientific research papers in recent years. Peter Alexander et.al. write about ‘Losses, inefficiencies and waste in the global food system’ (In: Agricultural Systems, Volume 153, May 2017, Pages 190-200, doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2017.01.014)

The article contains two beautiful Sankey diagrams. The first depicts the global food system in 2011. Flows are shown as dry mass. Flows are not individually labelled with the underling quantity, but rather a scale at the bottom shows 5 representative flow quantities and their corresponding width.


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Crop (yellow) and grassland (green) net primary production (NPP) are shown as sources for the global food system. Losses are branching out as grey arrows. These “inefficiencies” of the system are described in detail in the article. The authors observe that “44% of harvested crops dry matter are lost prior to human consumption” and that “the highest loss rate can be found in livestock production”.

The second Sankey diagram shows a section of the above figure, just the dry matter flows from crop harvest and processing, without any losses. This is interesting because it allows us seeing the share of processed and non-processed food being consumed by humans worldwide, and the the share of crop-based food intake (dark blue) compared to animal-based food intake (red). You could call this the veggie / non-veggie split. Based on dry matter that is.


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If you want to see the corresponding global food system wet mass, protein and energy Sankey diagrams check out this interesting article. A recommended read for all of us eaters.