Feeding the world
Creating a world that is free of hunger is a struggle. Challenges of supply, quality and distribution require collaboration and intervention from across nonprofit organizations and companies alike. To International Paper (IP), supporting the effort to reduce these challenges makes sense: our products are relied upon every day to deliver produce from the farm to supermarkets, to package food effectively to reduce waste and prevent contamination and to ensure safe transit for products that sometimes travel thousands of miles. Meanwhile, it’s a reality that people around the world, in many cases children, do not receive the nutrition they need to be healthy.
As part of our commitment around Thriving People and Communities, IP has partnered with multiple foodbanking organizations to combat this issue, using our products to deliver goods to underserved communities across the United States, Latin America and Europe.
Our support of The Global Foodbanking Network (GFN) helps them to defeat hunger by creating new global food banks and elevating their work with increased efficiency, safety and scalability. This support enables food banks in Mexico, Canada, Spain, Poland, Italy, Chile and Guatemala to enhance their food recovery and redistribution programs to reach more people in need of assistance through grants and knowledge exchange.
In Mexico, for example, our partners created a school breakfast program that helped 200 children receive nutritious food they would not have otherwise. They were able to supply each child with backpacks that were refilled with items every 15 days that they able to take home to benefit their families and alleviate food insecurity for other meals.
Similarly, in Canada, students in every province and territory throughout the country were able to receive nutritious pre-packed food parcels, with special attention during the summer months when school nutrition programs are not available.
In Spain, the partnership was able to serve 1.35M people through the distribution of 172M kilograms of food to nearly 7,500 community organizations. IP's support in Poland helped their food bank's efforts by paying for staff, transport, and general operating costs.
For IP's partners in Chile, the grant not only helped fund for more staff, technology and logistics but it also helped them distribute 1,500 metric tons of fruit and vegetables to 1,733 community organizations serving 348,674 people. In Italy, over 100,000 tons of food was collected and distributed to 7,583 partner charities which assisted more than 1,660,000 individuals throughout the country.
