Should Supermarkets Be Forced To Donate Food They’re About To Throw Away? This Maltese Researcher Thinks So
Alexiei Dingli, a Maltese AI researcher who volunteers at a Valletta soup kitchen, believes the time has come to stop supermarkets from destroying unsold food items that haven’t passed their expiry date and force them to donate the products to food banks and soup kitchens.
“If you know that in a couple of days’ time you’re going to throw X amount of food away, you should be bound to provide it to NGOs who use that food to help the less-advantaged people,” Dingli said on Lovin Daily this week.
“I think it’s a very neat solution to solve this problem and I don’t understand why we’re still talking about this bill when it should have been done many years ago.”
In 2017, Dingli – who was then mayor of Valletta – drafted a bill to put his plan into action, largely based on a law that France had passed a year earlier. Although he presented it to the authorities, as well as the President of the Republic, it was never taken on board.
“Not only is the law working in France but there’s also a drive for European legislation similar to the French one, and a million signatures were collected a year ago to have this as European legislation. It’s a simple system which works, so what are we waiting for to adopt it?”
Dingli, as deputy administrator of the Franciscan-Friar-run Valletta OFM Soup Kitchen, recently developed an app intended to link supermarkets with soup kitchens and food banks.
Supermarkets that want to get rid of items which haven’t yet expired can simply create an entry for each product on the app, complete with a small description of it, their contact number and pick-up details.
NGOs will then be able to scroll through the app, choose the listed items they need and pick them up for free. To safeguard against abuse, NGOs will have to sign up and be vetted by the Soup Kitchen beforehand.
When launching the app, he presented some eye-opening statistics from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, estimating that around 88 million tonnes of food, worth some €143 billion, are thrown away globally every year, all while 88 million people cannot afford a quality meal.
And as the UN warns of a serious risk of global famines due to the war in Ukraine and supply chain blockages, it would seem that the industrial wastage of food shouldn’t be accepted any longer.
Do you agree with this proposal?
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