LONDON (Reuters) – The Archbishop of Canterbury has said he found seeing the hungry in Britain to be less serious but more shocking than the plight of those starving in some places in Africa.
Justin Welby, head of the 80-million strong Anglican communion, compared his two recent experiences of seeing hungry people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to talking to a family making a collection of free food in England.
“I found their plight more shocking. It was less serious, but it was here. And they weren’t careless with what they had – they were just up against it,” Welby wrote in the Mail on Sunday.
“The scale of waste in this country is astonishing. As a nation we discard about 15 million tons of food a year, at least four million thrown out by households,” he said.
A cross-party parliamentary inquiry into Hunger and Food Poverty published on Monday highlighted the growing reliance by needy Britons on food banks, which provide the needy with free emergency supplies.
The Hunger and Food Poverty inquiry found that the number of people in Britain provided with emergency food assistance by one charity, the Trussell Trust, rose to 913,138 in 2013-14, up seven-fold from 2011-12.
Read more at Reuters
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