3 Ways Global Food Banks Address Hunger, Improve Nutrition and Build Better Food Systems
julio 9, 2025
Food banks around the world bolster their communities by recovering food that would otherwise go to waste and redirecting that food to feed people facing hunger — while preventing methane emissions from food loss and waste at the same time.
Food banks are facing multiple barriers to their work — like high food prices, supply chain disruptions and cuts in overseas humanitarian assistance. And these same issues are causing a surge in demand for food bank services. But despite the myriad challenges, food banks are rising to the occasion.
The GFN Spotlight 2024 draws on data we collected from 55 food banking organizations in our network across 46 countries. While it provides a glimpse at global food security challenges, it also highlights the remarkable accomplishments of our food banking partners. Here are a few of the takeaways from the data.
1. Food banks provided 2.1 billion meals to 38 million people.
Network food banks provided 762 million kilograms of food and other essential products — the equivalent of 2.1 billion meals — to 38 million people in 2024, which represents the highest figure for GFN outside of the COVID-19 pandemic.
About 84% of people served by a GFN member food bank last year live in emerging and developing market economy countries. In South Asia, India sin desperdicio de alimentos fed 3.2 million people in 2024, almost double the previous year. This was largely driven by an expanded role in a government-led school feeding program, which reaches more than 1,000 schools in southern India. No Food Waste doubled their distribution year-over-year to 7.5 million kilograms through opening new branches and increasing recovery of produce from farms and other agricultural sources.
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2. Food banks prevented 512 million kilograms of food from ending up in landfills.
Hasta el 10 por ciento de las emisiones globales de gases de efecto invernadero provienen de los alimentos que se desperdician. Y cuando los alimentos se descomponen, crean metano, un gas de efecto invernadero que atrapa más de 80 veces más calor que el dióxido de carbono durante los primeros 20 años.
In 2024, food banks kept 512 million kilograms of food out of landfills, which prevented 1.9 million metric tons of CO2e — that’s equal to the emissions of 443,000 passenger vehicles in a year or the amount of carbon captured by a 1.9-million-acre forest.
Banco de Alimentos Quito, in Ecuador’s capital, is a leader in the work of methane mitigation. The food bank is a key partner in GFN’s FRAME methodology, which helps food banks prove their role in cutting food waste and reducing methane emissions. Through that work, Banco de Alimentos Quito is now a part of the Ecuadorian government’s Zero Carbon Program (Programa Carbono Cero) and is helping drive stronger national policy to reduce the environmental impacts of food loss and waste.
3. Fruits and vegetables are the most common foods people receive from food banks — produce accounts for 41% of all food distributed.
Increasingly, food banks are partnering with small- and large-scale farmers to collect surplus food to distribute to people facing hunger. Right now, 35 GFN members support some version of these agricultural recovery programs.
In 2024, network food banks recovered 147 million kilograms of food from farms, packhouses and produce markets — more than double the amount compared to five years ago.
This emphasis on recovering fresh produce is a large part of the reason that the single largest category of food recovered by GFN members in 2024 was fruits and vegetables.
One of GFN’s newer members, Llueve Banco de Alimentos de Etiopía, launched its agricultural recovery program last year in the midst of rising food insecurity and famine. The food bank brought in 60,000 kilograms of fresh fruits and vegetables, driving their total distribution up by 60% when compared to the year prior. Now working with large commercial farms, It Rains has access to an abundance of nutritious food, with 99% of what they distribute considered nutritious, the highest figure in the network. The food bank is continuing to scale their efforts to serve people and local organizations impacted by foreign aid cuts.
