ACCRA // When it comes to excess and wastefulness, the affluent West is usually the worst offender. But when Elijah Amoo Addo, a trained chef from Ghana, saw a homeless man collecting food scraps in the capital, Accra, he realised his own country was no less guilty. And that got him thinking.
What if the food that people threw away or did not use was gathered up and given to those who did not have enough? Was it possible that there would actually be enough food in Ghana to feed everyone?
It was a radical idea for a country with 27 million people but no social welfare system, where the only place to turn to when times are hard is family and friends. People would need persuading, Elijah realised. The result was Food For All Ghana, which has provided 48,000 free meals to the needy in the last three years.
The charity is modelled on a French system whereby supermarkets must by law donate unsold food to charities and food banks. In Ghana, the charity also asks food manufacturers and suppliers for surplus products approaching their best-before dates. Then volunteers visit orphanages, hospitals, schools and communities every weekend to cook for those in need and to hand over donated foodstuffs for future use.
“We have kids who are out of school just because they can’t get food to eat and we have families who sometimes can’t afford a plate of food in the day ” said Elijah, 25. Orphanages which serve as shelters for homeless children also run out of food, he added.
One such place is the New life Nungua children’s home in the suburbs of Accra where funding is a struggle, said founder Nii Afotey Botwe II. The home has come to rely heavily on help from Food For All Ghana. The donations give the children a varied diet — and a few treats such as potato crisps — which the orphanage could not otherwise afford.
In Ghana, pregnant teenagers, the disabled or people with mental health and addiction problems may well be abandoned by their families and forced to live on the streets. They too have benefited from the scheme.
In 2013, the charity carried out a study into waste in the supply chain and its economic and environmental effect. They concluded that more than 25 per cent of food in Ghana goes uneaten.
The study urged companies to conduct regular “food waste audits” and set targets to reduce waste, and also called for the government to support public education and food recovery campaigns.
According to a report by Unicef this year, 3.5m children in Ghana — more than a quarter of all the country’s children — live in poverty and 1.2m of those live in households which do not have the means to feed them adequately.
The World Bank says just under 25 per cent of all Ghanaians live below the poverty line, thanks to rising inflation and a currency which has depreciated in recent years. Yet Elijah claims cutting food waste by just 15 per cent would provide enough to feed more than seven million Ghanaians every year.
At Kwatsons food import and distribution company, one of the firms participating in the food donation initiative, the management sees it as “a way of helping society”.
Elijah is convinced that eliminating inefficiency could end hunger in Ghana. The country imports enough food to feed its people, he insisted, but flaws in the supply chain mean too many are going short unnecessarily.
“We are not far away from solving the issue of hunger, but until we solve the issue of food wastage ... it might seem that hunger will always be in our society,” he said.
Last month, Food For All Ghana hosted its first anti-waste conference, linking suppliers and distributors, and encouraging more companies to help feed those in need, and Elijah wants his food recovery scheme to spread all over Africa. Incentives to businesses who donate excess produce would help, which is where the government could play its part, he said.
“There is a need for Africa to actually have these community-based food banks to ensure that feeding the vulnerable within our society becomes a possibility because Africa actually is producing enough food,” he said. “Africa is food secure if we ensure efficiency within our supply chain.”
* Agence France-Presse
