Most fruit and vegetables consumed in the U.S. are grown in Mexico, but plenty more never arrive, with more than a third of Mexico’s food going to waste, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Dana Yost, president and CEO of the Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, said that is often because market conditions in the U.S. change and make it unprofitable to move the produce over the border and sell it. Or sometimes, the produce is imperfect, but still edible.
Yost said an estimated 7 billion pounds of food are wasted in Mexico every year, of which the majority, perhaps 70%, is harvested and then discarded. Sometimes it is used as animal feed, other times just dumped.
“I have a video from a couple of years ago of literally millions and millions of pounds of tomatoes just being dumped in fields,” he said, adding that this represents a waste not just of food but of the water used to grow it, and of environmental costs in terms of fertilizers used and methane emitted by the rotting produce.
But with a new agreement between a food bank alliance in Mexico, the Bancos Alimentos de México or BAMX, and the Roadrunner Food Bank, he hopes this will change so that more food will get to people who need it, across Mexico and in the U.S. too.
On Wednesday, representatives of the BAMX and Roadrunner Food Bank signed an agreement in Albuquerque that Yost said will see the partners share expertise about logistics and transportation of food, so that Mexican food banks can use produce that would otherwise go to waste.
“We have a very robust food bank network in the U.S.,” he said. The Feeding America network consists of nearly 200 food banks which coordinate to rescue and distribute food.
“We’re trying to help the Mexican food banks to understand and adopt different models as well as build their capacity to actually rescue food.”
And then, Yost wants to move any excess food over the border.
“There’s enough food waste down in Mexico, fresh produce waste, to feed all of the hungry people in Mexico and virtually all the hungry folks that are in the U.S.,” he said.
Yost used to be vice president of supply chain operations with the Arizona Food Bank Network, where he said he brought more than 100 million pounds of food over the border for Arizona food banks, and partners in more than 30 different states.
Now, he hopes to see food flowing to New Mexico, which has some of the highest food insecurity rates in the country.
He wants to, “do something to make things better around this amount of food waste, and then the other side of it is that we’re also solving hunger and food insecurity.”`