They will rescue fruits and vegetables from the Producers Market to distribute in canteens

The mayor Emilio Jatón signed a cooperation agreement with the Food Bank and the Market of Producers and Suppliers of Fruits, Vegetables and Vegetables. The agreement has a double purpose: to rescue and put in conditions the food that comes from the Market and to reduce the garbage that is produced in that productive space of the provincial capital.

On the occasion, the municipal delegation was made up of officials from various areas, since the municipality proposes to address the initiative in a comprehensive manner. It was the General Secretary of the Municipality, Mariano Granato, who explained that the agreement “is part of the work carried out by Urban Lab, a space in which more than 120 men and women from Santa Fe defined some of the central problems of the city. There this inconvenience appeared that has to do with the amount of food that is permanently discarded and buried in the landfill,” he explained.

In line, the official highlighted “the collaborative work that the Food Bank network does in the country and particularly in the city of Santa Fe, to recover that food and give it an end that raises the nutritional quality of our neighborhoods and soup kitchens.” .

Regarding the objective of the collaborative work that was embodied through the agreement, Granato indicated: “This agreement tries to recover more and more food to improve the nutritional quality of our neighborhoods, school canteens and municipal gardens. In this way, a logistics network with a better recovery and distribution of everything that is lost daily and ends up in the sanitary landfill,” he stressed.

It should be noted that the recovered fruits and vegetables are distributed among more than 120 institutions. In this sense, Granato stated that “there is already a network of community kitchens in the municipal gardens, but we are always open to the possibility of incorporating more territorial actors.” According to him, “a great challenge that appeared in this process is to give added value to these foods that are recovered and also to be able to generate other types of processes so that they last longer and can be used for different things.”

For his part, the president of the Market of Producers and Suppliers of Fruits, Vegetables and Vegetables, Carlos Otrino, reported that thanks to a previous agreement, the Food Bank “was able to develop the recovery center in a space that belongs to the Market. The proximity of the Bank to the recovery of fresh food was of crucial importance to avoid loss and waste,” he indicated, adding that “this agreement complements each other very well because it involves the local authority, which knows the reality of the territory, and allows us to work on the axes that have an impact on this issue”.

Referring to these points, he explained that “the first axis is the social one, which involves bringing food security where today there is insecurity and vulnerability. The second is the economic axis, which allows us all to deduct costs in the structure. And the third is the of reducing environmental impact”.

For these reasons, he described as “extremely important the proximity to the municipality and the Food Bank, which is an actor impossible to replace in this structure,” concluded Otrino.

Subsequently, Mónica Cavallero, a volunteer from the Bank, recalled that from the entity that integrates “we always try to make strategic alliances to reduce food waste, which is our great objective. Now we join the Municipality and the Market not only to reduce losses of fruits and vegetables, but also to achieve food security for the population most in need”.

Another of the volunteers, Irene Achenbach, recalled that the Bank serves more than 127 entities, which far exceeds 14,000 people. “So we believe that this agreement is absolutely essential to bring more fruits and vegetables to the tables of the entities,” she said.