Large quantities of food in the world are being thrown away unnecessarily, and they often end up as waste. If we reduce the waste of food by just a quarter, there would be no hunger in the world, experts say, so food management and donation of food surplus should become imperative to involve donors, retailers and food producers. According to the European Parliament's report on reducing food waste and increasing food safety, by 2030 countries should halve the amount of wasted food. The situation is unfavorable in almost all countries, and also in the European Union, where according to Eurostat about 23 percent of the population is exposed to the risk of poverty or social exclusion, while at the same time about 88 million tons of food are being thrown away every year.
Unnecessary food waste is an acknowledged problem, and its political and social significance has grown in recent years. Many times in the last decade, the need to fight unnecessary food waste has been expressed at a high political level. Unnecessary food waste occurs in all links of the so-called food supply chain: production, processing, wholesale, retail and consumption.
North Macedonia is not an isolated case in the phenomenon of food waste. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) ranks our country in eighth place in the world in terms of the amount of food waste according to the number of inhabitants. The publicly available data show that large amounts of food are thrown away in our country, which in most cases can be used as a surplus. The food waste in North Macedonia has the potential to feed around 13,000 citizens with three meals a day. And while on the one hand, we have a high percentage of the so-called surplus of food, at the same time more than 400,000 citizens have a problem with providing food. Due to a lack of finances, these citizens have on average one meal a day. But what is also worrying is the trend of losses which is increasing. About 30% of the food which is produced or imported is never used because it spoils immediately after production, during transportation, or is thrown away by the large commercial chains during distribution.
One of the solutions that would alleviate this problem is legal regulation. But the question is what will be solved when we have low awareness and mistrust in the system of food distribution and production, on the one hand, and no stimulations for donors on the other. Namely, with a proposal - the law would regulate and support the donation of large quantities of food that come from the processes of production, storage and sale by farmers, factories, supermarkets, suppliers...
In our country a few years ago there was a draft law on donating surplus food which was prepared by the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. There was also a working group composed of several ministries and several civil society organizations for the preparation and implementation of this law. Our association was part of this working group. However, in the end, the draft law, for reasons unknown to us, did not receive political support and was never put to a vote in the parliament of North Macedonia.
Kindness occasionally collects surplus food and donates it to the homeless independently. But these activities are not only sporadic and of a very small scale, but are also ad-hoc, that is, on the initiative and at the call of a party or an individual who has the food surplus that they are willing to donate, and are not initiated by our association. To successfully reduce food waste and regularly redistribute excess food to the poor, a structured, systemic solution is needed that currently does not exist, and we will try to start its creation with this project.