I’ve long watched government officials visit schools and communities to open a new food garden with the express intention of providing children and teachers with the means to grow their own food. Decades later, despite producing and importing enough food to feed the country, 15.3 million people (25% of the population) are still suffering from hunger. The causes of hunger are economic factors that result from political decisions. This article will argue that despite the complex factors behind this statistic, the South African government has the power to improve food security outcomes. In the face of the climate crisis, global market volatility and worsening poverty, the government, compelled by our Constitution, has the responsibility to act now.
The statistics on food insecurity paint a bleak picture of its extent and severity across the country. As mentioned, 25% of our population experiences hunger; 63% of South Africans are food insecure (they do not have the means to access suitable nutritional needs); and 27% of children (under five years) experience stunting, which impedes their physical and cognitive abilities. usually as a result of malnutrition. Additionally, electricity and water prices have increased by 68% and 50% over the past 5 years respectively. As a result, people are struggling to pay for these basic services and still be able to acquire sufficient nutritious food. Low-income households are already spending 40% of their income on food, so when food prices spike, even more people go hungry. This leads to truly heartbreaking events such as in the Eastern Cape where a woman killed her two children and herself to avoid them all suffering from hunger. In Gauteng, a woman and her child are pushed to eat leaves from mulberry trees just to stave off hunger. There is a clear need to intervene to change public and private policies and practices which are allowing this to happen.
Hunger and food insecurity in South Africa are the results of people not being able to afford and access food. In other words, the root cause of food insecurity is the fact that the price of food is too high. One of the express focuses of a food security response should therefore be on how to address food prices. A broader and more holistic national hunger response should be based on the six widely agreed dimensions of food and nutrition security: availability, access, utilisation, stability, agency and sustainability. Availability refers to the presence of nutritious food in any given area. Access entails that individuals should have the physical and economic means to access food. Utilisation refers to the way food is prepared, including the body’s ability to use the nutrients consumed (impacted by diet, sanitation, healthcare, etc). Stability means consistent access over time in light of climate and economic shocks which affect this. Agency refers to the rights and capacity of individuals to feed themselves on food appropriate for them and shape their food system to meet their needs. Last, sustainability refers to the ability of the food system to provide food now and for future generations without depleting the resources or harming the environment.
Food prices are influenced by a range of complex factors, some of which are largely outside our (South African government) control. These include the climate and ecological crises such as extreme heat and drought, flooding, pests and diseases. Another is the costs of inputs like fertilisers, pesticides, animal feed, seeds and energy. Other factors are in our control to some extent but still influenced by international factors including tariffs and international trade dynamics. A factor largely in our control is the concentration of producers, processors and retailers. Concentration is largely overlooked but is arguably one of the most important problems to address in the pursuit of food insecurity. There is a clear and well-documented problem with this. It concentrates the power to shape markets, policy and governance of food into the hands of a few economic elite actors. These actors’ mandates are not in the interest of ordinary citizens, they are squarely focused on maximising their profit. This dynamic undermines the agency (the choice and opportunities) of ordinary people to participate and shape the food system.
To understand this dynamic of high levels of concentration, it’s important to recognise that as South Africa’s population grows and demand for food rises, the market is increasingly dominated by large food manufacturers and supermarket chains. These actors are also owned by a shrinking group of investors, which concentrates the food system into even fewer economic elite hands. These bigger players have greater resources and strategies to invest in, and establish a strong presence in both urban and rural areas. Over time, they consolidate themselves as the only places people can get food reliably. The scale of this dominance is significant: Shoprite-Checkers, Pick n Pay, Spar, Massmart and Woolworths together account for 60% of all food retail sales in southern Africa. The consequence is that South Africans are becoming increasingly reliant on a shrinking number of food suppliers. When disruptions occur – whether from economic shocks, supply chain issues or other factors – higher costs are inevitably passed on to consumers who are left with few options to get food outside of that small cohort.
These companies often inflate their contribution to broader development goals of the country by citing charitable corporate social investment initiatives such as developing food gardens or providing food for soup kitchens. They also boast of their contribution to employment. While these are undoubtedly helpful, they should only be seen as performative gestures when their practices embed elements of hunger in the country. For example, Woolworths’ CEO earned R122-million in 2023 – 1,308 times more than his lowest-earning employee. Shoprite and Spar’s CEOs earned R65-million and R25-million – 1,000 and 416 times more than their lowest-paid workers respectively. Paying their workers more and their CEOs less would have far better outcomes for food security.
The concept of food gardens is charming and a useful thing for people to do, but they will not solve the hunger problem. Food gardens do not account for the difference in scale of food that is needed and what the gardens are able to produce. As researcher Dr Tracy Ledger says, “there is no way that establishing a couple of rooftop food gardens in Johannesburg is going to feed the literally millions of food insecure people in the city”. We need real solutions.
Before continuing on to how we propose beginning to address food security in the country, it’s important to note the recent positive developments I’ve observed from our public officials this year. At the international level, this year’s G20 (hosted by South Africa) task force on food security has made macroeconomic issues the focus of its work in understanding food price fluctuations, with the aim of putting forward food price control measures to address them. Nationally, Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen has put forward a rational proposal to manage our country’s food price increases by reducing our dependency on imports and improving infrastructure along agricultural value chains. He has also called on the private sector to lower costs, improving efficiency and reducing waste. At a local government level, Gauteng’s MEC for agriculture and rural development Vuyiswa Ramokgopa has shown great understanding of the factors affecting food accessibility and has highlighted the humiliating amount of food waste in the country.
All three recognise the irony that we produce enough food and that the problem lies in affordability and accessibility. While we may not agree with the approaches of these representatives, these developments mark an important change of tack.
At the recent conference Land, Life and Society hosted by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, I listened to experts speak about specific actions needed to be taken. Here is a list of actions that I took from the conference that are necessary to get our food systems to work for ordinary people and smaller market actors:
- The government needs to provide our competition authorities with more resourcing to crack down on anti-competitive behaviour. To illustrate the need for a stronger competition commission in our food system, consider their latest Essential Food Price Monitoring report, which outlines these exact concerns and highlights foods that have drawn attention because of their price discrepancies along the value chain. The commission looked for signs of “rocket and feather pricing” of certain food items – the phenomenon where prices quickly rise when costs increase but fall much slower when costs decline, allowing retailers to maintain wider profit margins at the expense of consumers;
- We need public investment into public fresh produce markets. To illustrate the importance of them, consider that the Johannesburg Fresh Produce Market accounts for about 45% of the total value of sales across all the national fresh produce markets. Combined, they account for 40% of sales from South African fresh produce farmers. The number of informal retailers who operate in this market keeps food prices competitive and is a critical access point for lower-income households in Johannesburg;
- We must support, not vilify, informal street traders. Entrepreneurs outside of the formal retail markets are still not recognised and are often vilified by the state as unreliable sellers. Some estimates suggest the informal market accounts for about 40% to 50% of total retail sales (worth about R360-billion a year) and employs more people than the formal retail sector. These entrepreneurs play a critical role in people accessing food. They sell close to where people live and work, work long hours (making them convenient for people who also work long hours), sell in flexible quantities to respond to what people need and can afford, and charge lower prices than formal retailers. Despite their valuable contribution, they are largely excluded from government policy decisions;
- We should explore the public procurement and distribution of food. The concept has recently gained attention following New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign push for city-owned grocery stores to address affordability and access to nutritious food. This has been a model for India, which has demonstrated its effectiveness at scale. There has also been a huge success story of its ability to beat hunger in Brazil;
- Agroecology needs to be embedded as a core focus for how we produce food in the country. It is an approach to producing food that focuses on methods that improve the ecosystems on which our production is based. It also emphasises the importance of social systems that define how food is produced, distributed and consumed. Agroecology is increasingly recognised as a mode of adapting our farming systems to the impacts of climate and ecological collapse. Agroecology is already in government discourse, is practised by farmers across the country and advocated for by a range of different organisations; and
- Reducing food loss and waste must be a priority along the value chain. The fact that the country loses 30% of its production to loss and waste is humiliating and points to the inefficiencies of our food system. There is a growing number of NGO initiatives that have taken on the responsibility of distributing this food to those in need, but as the CEO of SA Harvest often says to me, “we have to address the systemic factors”.
The government of South Africa has a mandate to feed its people, compelled by our Constitution. Following years of deregulation and liberalisation of our food system, which began in Derek Hannekom’s tenure from 1996, the food system has become increasingly controlled by fewer companies. This level of control and power has locked ordinary South Africans into a dangerous dependency on an increasingly smaller pool of actors. This is making our already shameful levels of hunger even more precarious as climate and ecological crises unfold around us.
The good news is that there are signs that a growing number of public officials are coming to terms with addressing the root causes of hunger as opposed to following virtue-signalling models pushed for by corporates. We also have good frameworks available to us to address hunger holistically and have immediate steps, as suggested above, that can be taken to advance these objectives. DM