This is true for many fruit and vegetable crops. To prevent trucks of produce from being rejected, crops are “culled” (hand sorted) after they are picked. About half goes into the truck on its way to the store. The other half goes into the truck going to the dump, or destined to be plowed under and sprayed with insecticide. The food being thrown away is not rotten or bad in any way.

This news come hot on the heels of the UN food summit in Rome which ended in failure as delegates bungle the final declaration. As I reported on the the Rome conference for the last three days, here, here and here, I personally did not have much hope that anything of substance would be accomplished in three short days, marred by the presence of two tyrants, Mugabe & Ahmadinejad who both managed to lay all ills at the foot of the western world’s door.

The UN’s food crisis summit lurched to a messy end in Rome yesterday as brave hopes failed to translate into convincing commitments to tackle the soaring threat of world hunger. A final declaration was only agreed after hours of bickering over the language. And the final text failed to disguise dramatic differences over the cause of price inflation and its cure.

Nevertheless, it is America which has once again been subject to the biggest criticism at the Rome summit – this time for its policy of vast ethanol subsidies, with its effect of turning about a quarter of what was its corn production into fuel for cars, blindly promoted by George W Bush when he was made to realize that his Iraq war had failed in its objective of increasing the supply of “friendly” oil from the Middle East. Someone ought to send a memo to the future President, Barack Obama, to ensure that this absurdity would end on his watch.

Although the World Food Program has been given an additional $3bn of emergency food aid, and the Islamic Development Bank has promised to deliver $1.5bn to help farmers in some of the poorest countries increase production, I find that since the conference was informed that up to $30bn a year in aid pledges (UN’s Ban Ki Moon figure) would be necessary to alleviate the developing world’s hunger, these sums are hardly cause for great celebration.

The prevalent view to solve the global food price emergency is to invest heavily in agricultural production in poor countries through UN agencies, eliminate rich world farm subsidies and impose a moratorium on recently established bio-fuel programs. To enable these policies we need strong leadership, and political will, which frankly, is lacking worldwide.

Reading through several online news (BBC, EuroNews, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel), Senior European officials say some of those countries, prompted by Brazil, will not sign a final statement which might “demonize” biofuels. Brazil – one of the main biofuels producers – has fiercely defended its right to grow sugarcane for ethanol.

“All the regions without exception have accepted the language of the draft declaration. All countries and regions are unhappy with some elements, the EU is unhappy with the mentions of trade, for example, but they have compromised. But the Latin Americans are not budging,” the official added.

Ban Ki Moon praised French President Nicolas Sarkozy for pledging more than $1.5 billion over the next five years to boost agricultural productivity in Africa. Saudi Arabia has already announced it is giving around $500 million to the World Food Program to deal with the emergency in the short term, and the United States has committed some $5 billion over the next two years, much of it to help find long-term solutions. The leaders quickly laid out their disagreements on a key issue: how much the rush for environmentally friendly biofuels is contributing to soaring prices that are causing hunger and unrest worldwide. Discussion of whether to scale back or push ahead with the introduction of biofuels – fuels made from sugar cane, corn and other crops – is likely to weigh heavily on attempts to come up with a global strategy to solve the crisis.

Proponents say the fuels are a way to combat climate change and rising oil prices, while others argue they accelerate global warming by encouraging deforestation and heavily contribute to the commodities price hike by diverting production from food crops to biofuel crops.

The president of Brazil, whose country’s sugar cane has long been used to produce ethanol that fuels cars and trucks, delivered an impassioned defense of biofuels.

“It is frightening to see attempts to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between biofuels and the rise of food prices,” said Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. “It offends me to see fingers pointed against clean energy from biofuels, fingers soiled with oil and coal.”

The United States, which also tried to exonerate biofuels from the charge of rising prices, has been heavily subsidizing corn-based ethanol production. Last year I reported that the 27-nation European Union endorsed a plan calling for a 10-percent share of biofuels for road vehicles by 2020. “In some cases, biofuel production is in competition with food supply,” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda told the Rome summit on Tuesday. “We need to ensure that biofuel production is sustainable.”

While agreeing that sustainability and innovation are needed, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer insisted that biofuels contribute only 2 or 3 percent to a predicted 43 percent rise in prices this year.

“The use of sustainable biofuels can increase energy security, foster economic development especially in rural areas, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions without weighing heavily on food prices,” Schafer said in his address. More money would go to cellulosic ethanol, made from plant matter. But even among countries like the U.S. and Brazil, there was little agreement on the best way to tap the energy source.

Understandably, Brazil’s president lashed out at the U.S. approach, saying corn-based ethanol is less efficient than the fuel produced with sugar cane and that the former can only compete “when it is shored up with subsidies and shielded behind tariffs.”

In sharp contrast to this conference, anthropologist Timothy Jones renewed his call on the BBC (and Al Jazeera) this morning to stop wasting foodstuffs. His in-depth study revealed that almost half the food in the country goes to waste – a statistic that should alarm an industry that is struggling to achieve greater efficiency in order to salvage profits.

Timothy Jones, an anthropologist at the UA Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, has spent the last 10 years measuring food loss, including the last eight under a grant from the US department of agriculture (USDA). Jones started examining practices in farms and orchards, before going onto food production, retail, consumption and waste disposal. What he found was that not only is edible food discarded that could feed people who need it, but the rate of loss, even partially corrected, could save US consumers and manufacturers tens of billions of dollars each year. Jones says these losses also can be framed in terms of environmental degradation and national security.

Food for thought. Tomorrow I’ll report on the wording of the so-called “declaration”.