/ 31 July 2006

Waste not, want not

While the average working South African donates a generous 2,2% of his or her salary to worthy causes — amounting to about R1-billion a month — huge amounts of food are still wasted every day.

It is almost impossible to determine how much surplus food is thrown away in South Africa because organisations that redistribute food work largely in isolation.

”This muddies the waters because we end up approaching the same potential donors,” said Gill Murray, head of operations at Feedback, a nationwide food re-distribution company.

”This does not achieve the desired outcome.” Feedback collects food that has reached its sell-by date from retailers and delivers this food to community organisations such as children’s shelters and old age homes.

Murray says previous attempts to establish a coalition failed because of ”different interpretations” of how to approach re-distribution.

If a united front existed, Murray says, retailers such as Pick ‘n Pay, Spar and Woolworths could be persuaded to restructure their systems to ensure the neediest beneficiaries, such as Aids orphans, are prioritised. At present, each store makes its own decisions about where to donate surplus food.

”Woolworths’s surplus food provides more than seven million free meals a year to those in need,” says Zinzi Mgolodela, corporate social investment manager. ”This is distributed through the store’s system, each store taking responsibility for identifying needy local charities and ensuring that the food meets the needs of this local needy community.”

While store managers and owners have been willing to cooperate, their enthusiasm has been curtailed by charlatans posing as charity organisations.

Melville Spar’s proprietor, Dimitri Panayiotou, donates food exclusively to the Johannesburg Child Welfare Society, after being ripped off by people posing as charity workers who then sold the food that he had donated.

Feedback, which redistributes about 2540,5 tonnes a year of food, has had to face this hurdle in its attempts to expand. ”When we started our operations in Jo’burg [in 2002] we struggled to find donors for a variety of reasons,” said Murray. ”One was that people had donated food and found out that it had been re-sold.”

While many non-profit organisations have sprung up in an attempt to minimise the dumping of food, overly strict regulations are creating new obstacles.

Val van Lieshout, a distributor for the Robin Good Initiative, which has about 500 beneficiaries operating in 10 urban centres countrywide, makes the trip to the Johannesburg Fresh Produce Market twice a week to collect food from the market’s food bank. Previously agents selling produce for farmers could donate damaged fruit and vegetables directly to charities, but about a year ago the market set up a food bank through which all donations must be channelled.

But the supply from the food bank is erratic as the market has appointed inspectors who determine which food is fit for consumption. The food that does not meet their standards is dumped in landfills.

In the past Van Lieshout managed to garner about 12 tonnes of vegetables on each visit. These days, she can hardly fill up a four-tonne truck. ”It’s not the agents that are the problem, it’s the floor managers,” she said. ”They take orders from the head of the market, [CEO] Bernard Magabe.” But Magabe says it is vital that all produce donated to NGOs goes through a quality assurance inspection to ensure that it is fit for human consumption. ”The risks associated with contaminated food that is given to NGOs far outweighs the benefit of receiving free food,” he told the Mail & Guardian.

In June the market destroyed 575,5 tonnes of produce, about 1% of the produce received for that month, but failed to account for how much was distributed through its food bank.

Charity organisations, however, argue that they can use their own discretion to determine what is or isn’t edible.

As we walk through the vast warehouse, bustling with forklifts bearing crates of turnips and buyers cutting deals on gargantuan bundles of carrots, Van Lieshout dives into a dumpster and unearths cabbages and broccoli that are clearly partially edible. ”If you take the top leaves off this cabbage, you can use the rest,” she argues.

‘Surplus food is buried treasure’

Food Charity FareShare is setting up a scheme that it hopes will reduce the about seven million tonnes of food dumped in landfill sites in Britain every year, writes Fiona Walsh. A quarter of the food buried in the ground is edible, says FareShare chief executive Tony Lowe. ”It’s just that companies don’t know what else to do with it.”

^PThis week saw the launch of FareShare 1st, a business that aims to offer the food and drink industry a cheaper, greener alternative to landfill. It will take the surplus product off the manufacturers’ hands, distribute what is edible through its existing network, which fed more than 12 000 people last year, and then dispose of the rest by the greenest means possible, such as composting or animal feed.

^PThe United Kingdom government is committed to reducing the amount of waste that goes into landfill, and FareShare 1st says that not only will its solution be more environmentally sustainable, it will also be cheaper for manufacturers.

^PAll profits from FareShare 1st will be ploughed back into the charity. Lowe says the venture will break even in the first year but is aiming for profits of £250 000 by the fourth year.

^P”We will offer the food industry a one-stop solution,” he said. At the moment, FareShare takes only the food that can be eaten. Last year it delivered food to 250 organisations, contributing to more than 3,3-million meals for 12 000 people each day.

^PFareShare 1st has held trials for the venture, which guarantees to dispose of all a company’s food waste for the past year, through Nestle and Kellogg’s. It hopes to bring a number of other leading manufacturers on board.

^P”We’re bringing a corporate approach to a charity. We might have a charitable registration number but we are a business.” — Â