Food charity asks government to cover costs of charitable surplus food distribution

Howard Lake | 5 April 2018 | News

• Tagged with:
• donated goods
• statutory funding

Food charity FareShare is asking the public to support its ‘Feed People First’ campaign to help it deliver an extra 100,000 tonnes of good surplus food to charities across the country.
FareShare’s campaign is asking the Government to offset the costs of charitable food redistribution which could include re-packing, harvesting, transporting, storage and handling. If they did this, argues the charities, UK charities that receive and redistribute the food could save £150m. These savings could then be reinvested into their services and feed even more people in need.

Good food wasted

Every year at least 270,000 tonnes of good food is wasted in UK food production, according to WRAP (2016). This is because for food manufacturers, processors and packers it can be more expensive to redistribute good quality surplus food to the charities which support the 8.4 million people in the UK who go hungry than it is to send it to other processes of disposal.

 
FareShare Chief Executive Lindsay Boswell said: “It’s completely wrong that we have a situation where it’s cheaper to send thousands of tonnes of good edible food to anaerobic digestion plants or to animal feed, when there are millions of people experiencing food insecurity and regularly skipping meals across the UK right now.
“FareShare redistributes just 5% of the available surplus food, but with that we help feed half a million people a week – so just imagine what we could do with 100,000 tonnes. This is what France already does, and we know we can do it here too.”
He described the call on the Government to “help us access the food” as “a simple solution”, and urged the public to sign the Feed People First petition. The petition closes on 3 May 2018.
 

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.