South Africa throws away enough edible food each year to feed every hungry person in the country. The numbers are staggering: an estimated 10-million tonnes of food end up in landfills annually, while one in five South Africans goes to bed hungry.
For SA Harvest, the country's fastest-growing food-rescue and logistics NGO, this contradiction isn't just a moral crisis; it's a solvable systems problem. Their latest innovation, the Greenhouse Programme, aims to prove it.
"We have enough food to feed our nation. The challenge lies in the systems of how we move, store and preserve food efficiently and equitably," says Ozzy Nel, CEO of SA Harvest. "The Greenhouse Programme demonstrates that food waste and hunger are two sides of the same solvable problem."
Since its inception in 2019, SA Harvest has built a powerful national logistics network that rescues surplus food from farms, retailers and manufacturers, delivering it directly to more than 250 beneficiary organisations in South Africa. In just six years, it has rescued and redistributed more than 60-million kilograms of nutritious food, preventing an estimated 180-million kilograms of CO₂-equivalent emissions from landfill decomposition.
Read more at Times Live
