The availability of food is the starting point of all life. The main issue around food is whether people can afford it, a nutritious adequate diet that makes for healthy human beings.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) defines food security as “A situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.
Food insecurity is strongly related to unemployment and poverty. The two are justifiably linked as the first two goals of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): “No poverty” and “No hunger”.
“Food sovereignty” serves as an alternative paradigm to the current global “food security” narrative. “Food security” says nothing about where food comes from, or how and under what conditions it is produced and consumed. Food security offers little in the way of alleviating hunger, and even less for the contradictions of hunger and malnourishment in the global agri-food system.
Source: Busiso Moyo, South Africa’s new food and nutrition policy fails to address constitutional right to food (adapted).
With a child dying every six seconds because of undernourishment-related problems, hunger remains the world’s largest tragedy and scandal.
Source: former FAO Director-General, Jacques Diouf.
This is a new face of hunger. There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market.
Josette Sheeran, said whilst head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP)
Food security doesn’t begin and end on the shop shelf; it starts out in the farmlands and depends on farmers who can produce at a big enough profit to justify their risk and hard work. Once farming confidence goes and younger farmers lose interest and move elsewhere, no amount of social or political engineering will turn the boat around.
Source: Roelof Bezuidenhout, Eastern Cape farmer
We are told of the great advances that have been made in ‘modern’ agriculture in the last 60 years. Yet there are more hungry and malnourished people on our planet today than in the whole history of humanity. While agricultural policies are directed towards cash crops, the income that this generates for rural people rarely covers their food needs.
The world produces more than enough calories to feed everyone, and other important issues are at stake. Social inequity, inequality, inefficiency, waste, environmental degradation and biased global economic policies are but a few. Moreover, feeding the world is not just about ensuring that there are enough calories; the quality and variety of food are equally important. It is time to start looking at food and nutrition from a different perspective: the focus should shift from food security to food sovereignty and nutrition security.
Source: Farming Matters, www.farmingmatters.org (adapted)
Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of him and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care”, and the second of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is “End hunger”. How do we improve the current global food system which fails the estimated 800 million people globally who experience food insecurity?
Each day, between 800 – 900 million people go hungry. In a world where there was not enough to go around, perhaps this could be understood. But the fact is that we already produce enough food to ensure everybody could have enough to eat. And then we essentially throw one-third of it away. Food waste and loss reaches an astonishing 1.3 billion tonnes per year.
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Unfortunately, despite the [agricultural] sector’s successful contribution to food security through the availability of food, overall growth of the economy remains low and the stark reality is that approximately half of the South African population cannot afford a basic healthy diet. Bureau for Food & Agricultural Policy, 2021.
Food security is not easy to quantify and figures differ. Statistics South Africa (Stats SA)’s General Household Survey (GHS) is one source. The annual Global Food Security Index, released by The Economist and Corteva, is another. South Africa regressed from 44 (out of 113), to 70th in the food secure rankings in 2021. See https://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com.
For South Africa to be food secure, food needs to be available both nationally and locally, and people have to have the means to access it – buying it, producing it or even bartering for it. Knowledge on nutrition also needs to be on-hand so that people can make informed choices about what they eat.
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Across the world two billion people live with hidden hunger. In South Africa, 24% of children under the age of 5 show signs of stunting, a sure indicator of hidden hunger. Hidden hunger in children means:
Source: Bright4Africa. Visit https://twitter.com/Bright4AfricaSA and www.facebook.com/Bright4Africa-South-Africa-1904640343102878/
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Food waste is reputed to cost the South African economy more than R61 billion annually. This is some 2.1% of the country’s GDP (CSIR, 2017).
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The national policy framework includes the Constitution (sections 27, 28 and 35) and the National Development Plan which identifies food security and nutrition as a consequence of poverty and inequality as well as a cause.
One of the objectives of the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan (NFNSP) 2018-2023 was to establish a multi-sectoral Food and Nutrition Security Council to oversee alignment of policies, legislation and programmes, and co-ordinate and implement programmes and services which addressed Food and Nutrition Security. Read about it at https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/25488 and www.nutritionsociety.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/National-Food-and-Nutrition-Security-Plan-2018-2023.pdf
South Africa’s proposed food losses and waste strategy is a comprehensive plan which is one of the key interventions of the National Waste Management Strategy. Find the blog “South Africa’s draft strategy to combat food losses and waste proposes interventions such as prevention, education, partnerships, regulation and monitoring” (October 2023) at www.agribook.co.za/blog
Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD) www.dalrrd.gov.za
The successful production of food cuts across other government department areas too. Some examples follow:
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If the way to get food is to buy it, problems result when the country has a constant unemployment rate of just over 25%. For this reason, any effort to empower food gardens at home are encouraged. Visit websites of role players like www.operationhunger.co.za and www.reelgardening.co.za.
The websites mentioned earlier on this page.
World overviews of food insecurity are given by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS-NET) – visit www.fews.net. See also the the latest annual Global Food Security Index at http://foodsecurityindex.eiu.com
