RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The director of the Plato Lleno organization, Adriana Cristante, said that more than 2.7 million kilos of food are wasted every day in the country and warned that NGOs, working every day, only manage to rescue less than 6,000 kilos a day, reported the weekly Búsqueda.
Cristante stated that it is more convenient for companies to destroy food than to donate it, mainly because of the fear of facing a legal problem if one of the donated products intoxicates a person.
Faced with this situation, ruling party senators Carmen Sanguinetti (Colorado Party) and Carmen Asiaín (National Party) proposed a bill on food donation under consideration by Parliament, which takes up an initiative presented in 2016 by then deputy Adrián Peña.
The bill proposes that the corresponding bromatological (food science) requirements be met and points out that once the food is delivered, the companies “are exempted from liability” if there is a problem.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), globally, between a quarter and a third of the food produced annually for human consumption is wasted, equivalent to approximately 1.3 billion tons.
FAO also estimates that 6% of global food losses occur in Latin America and the Caribbean, and each year the region loses around 15% of its available food.