Introducing New Legislation

Looking at programs that work in the States or elsewhere and transporting good ideas to another country can save time and money. After all, you can learn from previous mistakes and trials by others and only implement those key elements that you really need and will make your new program take off.

In creating Israel's first national Food Bank, we soon discovered that there were two key laws that made this work in the USA, but that Israel does not yet have.

The first is the Good Samaritan Law which protects volunteers and donors of surplus food and/or other items from frivolous lawsuits. As such, caterers, restaurants, and even schools and army bases can quickly and easily recycle their leftover food and put it to good use in place of simply disposing of it.

Companies with large amount of surplus, mislabeled food, or short dated foods, can donate them to charities with an ability to turn around and distribute them quickly in place of destroying them.

The 2nd law is The Bill Emerson Food Act which allows companies who donate excess or short dated food to deduct the value of these foods from their income.

Israel, has not yet passed either of these two laws!

We have spent considerable resources of time and money trying to impress upon legislators the importance of introducing and passing these laws, but so far with little success.

We are continuing these efforts in conjunction with other organizations and hope that in the near future, these laws will in fact be enacted.

Despite the lack of these laws, we sill collected thousands of tons of food and redistributed to more than 170 local charities all across Israel, but we know for a matter of fact, that had these laws been in place, our donations of surplus items would have been so much more successful and meaningful.