Debasing people’s basic right to access enough food is a travesty

I have been working in the food justice space for at least six years. When the work began it was especially daunting because it is a complex landscape and not easy to get people to engage with it.

South Africa’s hunger problem is driving a public health crisis, as evidenced by much research and advocacy work focused on this. One of the realisations that saddened me was that the evidence of families and children being stalked by hunger and noncommunicable diseases was not enough to spark action. Even more disturbing was that even the legal and constitutional obligation on the state was not enough to move it to act.

Section 27(1)(b) of the Constitution states that everyone has the right to sufficient food and water. Section 27(2) says the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of each of these rights. And section 28(1)(c) further states that every child has the right to basic nutrition, shelter, basic healthcare services and social services.

Constitutional rights are not self-enacting, and it has been heartening to see the many efforts by civil society organisations to ensure that all South Africans can at least try to exercise their rights.

Equally important is the work they do to highlight the systemic issues that bedevil citizens’ access to food and healthcare, including that no one government department or even intra-governmental structure exists with the mandate to realise these rights for South Africans.

To put it simply, there is no department of food or Chapter 9 institution whose mandate it is to ensure access to nutritious and sufficient food for all.

This is where the investigative hearings into the country’s food systems by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) become critically important. The hearings engaged not only civil society and experts, but government ministers and officials from departments such as agriculture, health, trade and industry, rural development, cooperative governance, planning, monitoring and evaluation, water and sanitation, social development and basic education. They were drawn in to secure the creation of a sustained systemic approach to bringing justice back into our failing and exclusionary food system.

At their heart, these hearings were about saving lives and preserving human dignity. So when, after they started on 12 March, you had the ANC’s Bernice Swarts, the ­deputy minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment, leading a campaign of volunteers handing out loaves of bread and chanting “One loaf, one family. From the ANC. In the ANC there is life, so one loaf means a lot”, one cannot help but be enraged by the contempt with which officials and their supporters treat poor people.

It can reasonably be inferred that the attitude of people like Swarts is precisely the reason for the state not being alarmed by South Africa sitting with 25% of the population facing hunger.

Although the deputy minister has since issued an apology, one has to wonder how an official could ever have thought such utterances were acceptable in the first place.

The SAHRC hearings recorded how seriously the state takes the health and dignity of its people. DM

Zukiswa Pikoli is Daily Maverick’s managing editor for Maverick Citizen and news.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.