A silent but relentless fact runs through many initiatives aimed at correcting the injustices of the food system.
It is not about a single project, but a systemic dynamic that repeats itself.
This fact is the 70/30 ratio:
70% dependence on the market or philanthropy,
30% actual autonomy.
In the case of Fondation Partage, 70% of the food distributed in 2024 was purchased, with only 30% recovered as surplus (2024 Activity Report).
In the case of the Refettorio, 70% of the budget was covered by external donations, and only 30% came from self-generated income (Fondazione Mater 2024 Activity Report).
This numerical coincidence is not accidental.
Numerous studies on the social economy (Jean-Louis Laville, OECD, Defourny) have shown that in advanced capitalist contexts, alternative initiatives survive within narrow margins of autonomy: the market grants space only if most resources (often between 60% and 80%) continue to depend on external funding, donations, or purchases (OECD source).
The 70/30 ratio is the sign of the times.
It is the concrete measure of the compatibility the system allows.
As long as you stay within those margins, you survive.
When you try to overturn the dominant logic, you enter into conflict.
This article analyzes how and why this forced betrayal occurred.
Not to condemn individuals or projects, but to reject the illusion that the system can be changed without changing its material foundations.
Let us start with one of the most emblematic cases: Fondation Partage.
Fondation Partage was born with the goal of recovering food surpluses and redistributing them to those in need, interrupting the absurd cycle of waste in one of the world's wealthiest cities.
According to the 2024 Activity Report, only 30% of the food distributed is recovered; 70% is purchased at a cost of approximately CHF 7,500,000.
The report does not specify from which suppliers these purchases are made, raising questions about transparency.
Through Samedi du Partage, citizens are invited to buy products from Migros and Coop supermarkets to donate to Partage.
In 2024, 202 tons of products were collected.
However, this is not surplus recovery but stimulation of new consumption, with direct benefits for large retailers. Two representatives from Migros even sit on the Fondation Partage board.
Partage has thus become an institutionalized actor in poverty management, sustaining the market rather than disrupting it.
Refettorio was founded as a solidarity restaurant, aiming to self-finance through paying customers while offering free meals to those in need.
According to the Fondazione Mater 2024 Activity Report:
Refettorio remains open and fights daily to keep its mission intact.
Yet without external support, the local market does not allow such a solidarity initiative to survive autonomously.
In Geneva, begging is largely prohibited: in 2023 alone, 920 fines were issued to vulnerable individuals (source).
At the same time, large retailers are free to beg publicly through food collection campaigns, strengthening their control over poverty management.
Migros is among the many stakeholders represented on the steering committee for the upcoming cantonal law on the right to food. While the draft has not yet been made public, and details remain unclear, the process raises important questions: Will this law truly enshrine the right to food as a justiciable obligation — or will it merely codify existing practices of delegated, often privatized, food aid? That distinction is not technical; it is political.
Partage and Refettorio tell the same story:
without structural transformation, every alternative is first tolerated, then normalized, and finally emptied.
Institutionalized charity does not fight the system; it consolidates it.
The market produces hunger.
Philanthropy manages it.
Politics watches and congratulates itself.
We will not save ourselves by refining hunger management or multiplying acts of charity.
The 70/30 paradox is not a curiosity or a failure of isolated projects: it is the concrete measure of the system’s compatibility with initiatives that do not dare to subvert it.
Tolerance and absorption are the methods by which the dominant order turns every attempt at resistance into a functional extension of itself.
As long as we accept these margins, we reproduce what we claim to fight.
If we truly want change, we must abandon the illusion of gradual reform and recognize that managing misery without transforming deeper structures is complicity, not emancipation.
We must build spaces that do not merely adapt to existing constraints but break the logic itself, questioning the very production of hunger, dependence, and exclusion.
In doing so, it is crucial not to fall into a further trap: solidarity cannot survive on the shoulders of individual citizens.
The right to food must not become a private transaction between paying customers and people in need.
Public institutions — the City, the Canton, the State — must assume responsibility.
Customer contributions should remain a free gesture of solidarity, not a substitute for public obligations.
As Tomaso Ferrando reminds us in "Law and the Politics of Food Waste", institutional management of waste — both material and human — is not a solution; it perpetuates the war against autonomy, dignity, and the very possibility of another social order.
We do not want to manage waste.
We want to abolish the need for charity itself, along with the system that produces hunger, waste, and poverty as normal conditions of social life.
This is the true challenge: not less conflict, but more imagination, more organization, and more disobedience.