Dina Ezzatlooks at the diverse challenges of putting food on the table, from the point of view of the consumer as well as the producer On the pavement of a crowded Giza street that is all but covered with black garbage bags, Ghanem sits under a dim street light. He selects one garbage bag after the other, tears it open, and with his right hand goes through the scattered waste. “I am looking for something to eat. What else would I be doing,” he asks with considerable anger that momentarily abates as his hand touches half a loaf of bread. This he immediately puts aside before he resumes his search. Over 60 years of age, with no job and no hope of finding one given that his ailing health does not allow him to do the only thing he knows how to do, carrying materials at building sites, Ghanem is now forced to look for something to eat in garbage bags. His declining eyesight has meant that even this is not easy, and he has to touch every item with his hands before he ends up with enough food. It is people like Ghanem that the charity the Food Bank was established back in 2005 to help serve by working to fight hunger. “We have been making huge efforts, but there is still a long way to go. We are hoping that in a decade from now we might be able to be a hunger-free country,” said Agharid Amin of the Food Bank team. Originally, the Food Bank was hoping to achieve the hunger-free objective by 2020. Today, Amin says, there is more hunger than there was before, but there is also a lot more resolve on the part of the many people who work against hunger. “In July, we will launch an initiative that could help us achieve this target even before 2020,” she added. Over the past eight years, the Food Bank has been working to target individuals and families who have no way of feeding themselves, or are not getting the food they need, by providing them with basic foodstuffs that could help them be reasonably well-nourished. “We look at people who cannot make a living at all, especially children and elderly people, and those who have nobody to provide for them. We also look at people whose income is provisional, and so is their access to basic food,” explained Amin. According to Naglaa Maarouf, another member of the Food Bank team, the search is done through non-governmental organisations that work on the ground across the country. “We work with all types of NGOs and charities, and we do not discriminate between those who serve on a gender basis and those who serve on a religious basis. We work with civil society to cater for all Egyptians with no discrimination whatsoever, targeting hunger wherever we can,” Maarouf said. “We send food to people in Halayeb and Shalatin and Sinai. We send food to both Christians and Muslims,” she added. Eligible families and individuals receive a monthly box containing basic foodstuffs including rice, macaroni, beans, oil and so on. On key holidays “both for Christians and for Muslims,” the Food Bank manages to offer extras, such as meat and chicken. Money generated by donations to the Food Bank comes from individuals in the form of seasonal or permanent gifts and from members of the business community who also fund the Food Bank. “Those who provide food give us donations in kind, and we also receive offers from companies to help us with transportation or packaging. This is in addition to financial donations,” Amin explained. “We are seeing the concept of social responsibility fulfilled as a result,” she said. Amin is proud that the partnership between the Food Bank and some members of the private sector has now led to hunger-free villages in Egypt. Since she joined the team in 2008, Maarouf has also seen new segments of society join the organisation's list of those it helps. These include retired civil servants whose own retirement packages are sometimes so insufficient that they cannot keep them fed for more than a week or two. “Obviously, this is a function of the rising prices of very basic foodstuffs,” Maarouf said. Also joining the expanding list of those needing help are street children, who are either born homeless or who are forced into homelessness due to poor and sometimes tormenting living conditions. Some of them end up marrying on the streets and having children of their own on the streets. With the slowing down of the economy and the increasing numbers of unemployed, whether permanent or temporary, more and more people have been qualifying for the assistance of the Food Bank, Maarouf said. Some schoolchildren in the poorer neighbourhoods of major cities, like those in poorer villages, are also being targeted by the Food Bank in order to improve the nutrition they receive. “The at-school nourishment programme is a key programme among our activities,” Amin said, which allows schoolchildren to break away from the limited dietary conditions they mostly have and enjoy better food. With the help of makeshift kitchens at the schools concerned, the Food Bank encourages mothers to come in and cook for the kids. “We provide them with warm meals or school-made desserts, and we also try to provide them with fruit and milk and yoghurt,” said Amin. She added that the objective was not just to keep them fed, “but also to make them happy by eating things that they would not otherwise have access to.” Making people happy is a fundamental part of the philosophy of this charity that is providing food on a regular basis for more than 150,000 families and is also providing millions of meals for other individuals and families on an irregular basis. “Fighting hunger is fighting anger,” according to the Food Bank's philosophy. “We have been successful in encouraging restaurants and cafes to give us the untouched food left over from dinners and parties and put it in portable food boxes to give to families and individuals living or working nearby. At first, there was not much enthusiasm, but now many hotels and restaurants are very keen on this task,” Amin explained. Amin works to provide resources, while Maarouf works to build links with charities that also cater for the poor and needy. They both feel that the jobs they are doing are greatly needed, and they both share the optimism that despite the challenges facing the country, which could take their toll on the donations made, there is still enough energy and determination in society at large to combat hunger. Amin said that she saw the best of this determination in the wake of the 25 January Revolution, when people were feeling very keen on improving the country. “We had a very good year for donations as a result,” she said. It was this faith in the goodwill that is out there that has prompted the Food Bank to pursue a complementary scheme with its still-expanding Medicine Bank and Clothes Bank. “Deprivation and poverty take their toll not just on what people can get to eat, but also on their ability to buy the medicine they need when they are ill and to find enough decent clothing,” Amin noted. It is also this keenness on the part of society to help combat poverty that is making the team of the Food Bank hopeful that its new initiative for a hunger-free Egypt will pick up soon. The initiative hopes that the government will work to formulate a more integrated and efficient food-security policy and that charities will keep on doing their part. A key element of the initiative is building awareness of the problem. “We need to make people more aware that they need to rationalise their consumption to make sure that prices do not soar too high, with the result that basic foodstuffs become unaffordable for many people. We also need to help people remember that they should not waste food, because there are those who need the extras they may have,” the Food Bank workers said.
