● Research Frontier ●
Food Bank is a charitable organization that helps the poor and distributes food. Its main purpose is to meet the food needs of the poor, and it also shoulders the mission of reducing food waste. All over the world, there are community organizations that aim to provide services to the poor. The operation of food banks can not only promote the efficiency and performance of these organizations, but also have a positive impact on the social responsibility of donating companies.
In 1967, the first food bank was established in the United States. Subsequently, food banks gradually expanded to the world. According to statistics from the “International Food Bank Network” (see the website www.foodbanking.org for details), the distribution of food banks around the world is as follows:
Test content of food banks
I. Experience of food banks in developed countries
Food banks originated in the United States, entered Canada in 1981, and entered Europe in 1984.
United States
The world’s first food bank was the “St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance” established in Arizona, USA in 1967. In 1965, while volunteering at a community cafeteria, John van Hengel discovered that grocery stores often discarded food that was damaged or about to expire, while poor people often had to rummage through the garbage. Inspired by this, Hengel began to collect food for community cafeterias, but soon found that one person’s strength was not enough, so he came up with the idea of establishing a special organization to accept food donations. With the help of St. Mary’s Cathedral, the first food bank was established and then expanded rapidly in the United States.
In 1976, Feeding America was established. Feeding America has 202 member organizations, providing more than 2 billion pounds of food and other supplies each year, benefiting more than 37 million people, including 14 million children and 3 million elderly people. The Feeding America network works at both the national and local levels:
Canada
Canada’s first food bank was established in Edmonton in 1981. In 1987, the Canadian Food Bank Alliance was established. It now has more than 700 food banks and has carried out more than 3,000 related projects.
The Canadian Food Bank Network consists of 10 member organizations (i.e. provincial alliances) and approximately 450 food banks (called affiliated members). This network covers 85% of the country’s population in need of emergency food assistance. In 2010, the network’s monthly beneficiary population was approximately 870,000, of which 38% were children. The members of this network jointly collect and distribute food and share the funds raised to efficiently benefit the target population. In 2009, the Canadian Food Bank Network distributed 10 million tons of food through the National Food Sharing System, and most of the donors also provided free transportation services. In addition to food from the Canadian Food Bank Network, community-level food banks mainly rely on volunteers to collect and distribute food, with a total scale of approximately 150 million tons per year.
Europe 1
The European Federation of Food Banks is affiliated to the European Anti-Poverty Network and consists of 240 food banks in 21 countries. In 2010, the European Federation of Food Banks collected nearly 360,000 tons of food with a total value of about 1 billion euros, and distributed food to 4.9 million people together with nearly 28 charities and social service agencies.
The European Food Bank has a strong staff camp, with more than 7,800 volunteers and 1,000 employees participating in the work of various food banks in Europe every day. Once a public food collection event needs to be organized, they can call on more volunteers to help.
The European Federation of Food Banks has close ties with the European Commission of Agriculture and the Social Affairs Committee. Among all the food collected by this federation, more than half of the food comes from the European Food Aid Project of the European Commission of Agriculture, 1/5 comes from the food industry sector, 15% comes from the retail industry, and 9% comes from individuals. It can be seen that the EU project plays an irreplaceable and key role in the operation of European food banks. What once worried the federation was that Germany asked the European Court of Justice to cut spending on the European food aid program because, in Germany’s view, the program should belong to the social category rather than the agricultural sector. However, due to the large number of supporters of the project, in March 2009, a European Commission proposal to support the project was passed, which saved the European Food Bank Federation from danger.
South Africa
Founded in 2009, the Food Bank of South Africa (FBSA) is a national food bank network in South Africa with branches in cities such as Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Pietermarzburg and Port Elizabeth, and is in continuous expansion. The South African Food Bank adopts a “pilot-promotion” government-led model. At the national level, the South African Food Bank works with the government, food producers, processors and retailers, and at the grassroots level, it works with community leaders, religious organizations and non-profit organizations to work on food security.
South Africa’s food production is sufficient to feed the entire population, but the food shortage rate in 2009 was still 20% (GHS, 2009), and 14 million people faced food insecurity (Statistics South Africa, 2010). Therefore, the problem lies mainly in affordability and logistics arrangements, which lead to a large amount of food being wasted, including waste of production surplus, unharvested crops and underutilization of processing equipment. At the 2008 South African Food Security Forum, the International Food Bank Network launched an action to solve the problem of hunger in South Africa. At the end of 2008, a series of organizations were established, including Feedback Food Redistribution, Lions Food Project, Robin Good Initiative and Johannesburg Foodbank. These organizations merged their operations to form a new organization, which is today’s Food Bank of South Africa (FBSA), dedicated to establishing a national food bank network covering rural and urban areas, and ultimately eliminating hunger and food insecurity.
The warehouses of the South African Food Bank are well-equipped and can store and sort all forms of food and non-food products. Every day, the food bank distributes food to various community warehouses, thereby reducing the transportation costs of 1,300 institutions distributed across the country. These institutions include orphanages, nurseries, nursing homes, shelters, soup kitchens and AIDS clinics, among others.
