The Food Banks against Hunger collected 2,086 tonnes of food, 24% more than in the first camapign in 2021, during a national campaign last weekend.
The collected food will begin to be distributed as of next week, helping to meet the food needs of around 400,000 people, supported by 2,600 institutions, either through food baskets or through prepared meals.
The value represents a 24% increase in relation to the campaign carried out in the same period of 2021, according to a statement from the Portuguese Federation of Food Banks Against Hunger.
This second campaign to collect food from 2000 supermarkets, after the confinement imposed by the covid-19 pandemic, involved around 40,000 volunteers from the 21 Food Banks spread across the country.
The president of the Portuguese Federation of Food Banks Against Hunger, Isabel Jonet, praised the “congregation of goodwill, both from the volunteers who gave their time, and from the thousands of donors who donated food, and from the many companies that supported the campaign”.
The federation underlined “the increased support needs faced by many Portuguese families, whose incomes are increasingly pressured due to the generalised increase in prices and interest rates”.
Last year, the 21 Food Banks operating in Portugal distributed 34,551 tons of food (with an estimated value of 48 million euros), with an average movement of 105 tons per working day.
Portugal recorded a 10.2% increase in year-on-year inflation in October, the highest figure since May 1992, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
The six-month Euribor rate, the most used in Portugal for home loans, reached 2.374% on Friday, the highest since January 2009.
In 2020, almost two million Portuguese were at risk of poverty, 200,000 more people than in the previous year.
Source https://postal.pt/
