Bam Aquino wants to create food banks for the poor

MEAL ON THE TRACKS. A man cooks fish along the railways in Manila. AP FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines— Why waste clean food when it could be given to the poor?

Sen. Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV wants food businesses to give their surplus food to food banks instead of throwing them away, proposing a bill that would facilitate the transfer of excess but clean food for the benefit of those who could not afford meals.

In Senate Bill NO. 357, or the Zero Food Waste Act, Aquino hopes to “ultimately end the cycle of having food end up in the trash instead of stomachs.”

“Given the high price of food these days, it is unjust that a lot of food goes to waste,” Aquino said in a statement.

His proposal comes on the heels of a Social Weather Stations (SWS) report that found that Filipino families who experienced involuntary hunger in the first quarter of the year reached 3.1 million, half a million higher than the number in the same period last year.

Aquino’s bill seeks to create a National Anti-Food Waste Scheme, appointing the Department of Social Welfare and Development to serve as a “coordinating agency between food businesses, such as food manufacturers, supermarkets, restaurants, cafeterias, and hotels, and food banks.”

Food businesses will be tasked to transport their excess food to food banks or distribution centers on their account, to ensure that the surplus would remain safe for consumption.

It also creates a self-sufficiency program, which provides the hunger-prone with training on livelihood and on the management of food banks so that they would eventually no longer depend on donations.

Those who will “deliberately make food waste unfit for consumption” and anyone who will bar the transport of food to food banks may face imprisonment of from six months to six years./rga

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