Scholars of Sustenance Thailand: Low COVID cases but higher HUNGER cases

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Sep 24, 2020, 08:03 ET

CARY, N.C. and BANGKOK, Sept. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --When the pandemic hit the world, it brought less COVID cases to the country but created a much bigger problem - HUNGER PANDEMIC. Thailand, known as a tourism hub which accounts to 15% of its GDP has no tourists since lockdown which led to severe job losses due to transmission control. This has affected the poor and middle-class households. Those living below 170 baht per day has significantly increased from 4.7million in Q1 to 9.7million in Q2. All of a sudden, people are more worried about food security than the deadly virus.

Scholars of Sustenance (SOS), a food rescue foundation that optimize food supplies in Thailand has been rescuing food from 100+ partners from the hospitality and retail industry since 2016. This operation was a huge success in saving tons of edible food from ending up in landfills and reducing CO2 emission until COVID happened. It hit the hospitality industry, causing significant cut on our rescued food. An unfortunate timing when more people need food, we have less to give.

With a difficult challenge comes a beautiful opportunity. The Retail Industry not only continued their support but increased their operation with us. Big supermarket brands such as Tesco Lotus, Central Retail, Tops Supermarket and Big C added more stores in our daily operations, with CP Fresh Mart and Family Mart joined recently. We launched our Food Repurposing Program that repurpose rescued ingredients weekly to a fresh meal served to communities in need as our immediate response to COVID last April. Now, this program evolved to what we call "Rescue Kitchen Program" launched last July that serves "nutritious" meals to low-income communities in Bangkok and in Phuket 3-4 times a week. We already served 110,000 meals in a span of 60 days with volunteers from different communities. We have reached the poorest and most ignored by the government and provided food on their table.

Soon, we'll expand our operation in Hua Hin as hunger is significantly increasing to many communities and been reaching out for months now. We need to respond soon. Our operational limitation should not be a reason not to extend help to other places in need. Help us by donating towards our logistic expenses so we can bring food to many communities. Please donate to SOS Thailand!

FEEDING2020: Please donate https://www.scholarsofsustenance.org/support-sos

Contact: Turid Kaehny, [email protected]
www.scholarsofsustenance.org
www.facebook.com/scholarsofsustenancefoundation/

SOURCE Scholars of Sustenance