SA is ranked 70th out of 113 countries, in The Economist’s Global Food Security Index for 2021 released last week, falling from position 69 in 2020 and 44 in 2019.
At face value, this fall is concerning. But when one looks at the index scoring’s technical position, it becomes clear that SA is not doing as badly as the “headline” ranking suggests.
Closer inspection reveals that SA’s scoring had a one-point year-on-year drop in 2020, and after that it remained unchanged. The score was 57.8 in 2021, the same as in 2020, but down 1.4 points from 2019. Ye, other countries have improved notably since 2019 as SA stagnated, resulting in the relative deterioration in SA’s ranking to 70.
The Global Food Security Index comprises four subindices, namely food affordability; food availability; food quality and safety; and natural resources and resilience. The affordability and availability have a higher weighting of a combined two-thirds. The affordability subindex includes a change in average food costs and proportion of a population in poverty. The availability subindex includes the sufficiency of supply, agricultural infrastructure, and political and social barriers to food.
In 2021, SA experienced a mild deterioration in the food affordability and availability subindices by 0.7 and 0.1 points, respectively. The rest of the other subindices improved marginally.
In the case of affordability, the major challenge was an overall increase in food prices. This is not far off from what even local researchers have observed in various surveys. The fifth wave of the National Income Dynamics Study — Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey highlighted that some households had run out of money to buy food since the pandemic started, thus observing a rise in food insecurity.
Supported prices
SA’s overall food price inflation has been elevated this year, averaging 6.5% y/y in the first eight months of 2021, from 4.8% in 2020. But this challenge speaks to the rising cost of food in an environment in which more people are out of work due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The rise in food prices is a global phenomenon and not unique to SA. The dryness in South America that negatively affected crops in the 2020-2021 production season, combined with growing demand for oilseeds and grains in China, and higher shipping costs, are some of the factors that have underpinned global food price inflation This, in turn, supported prices in SA.
In terms of availability, the deterioration of this subindex is inconsistent with the reality in SA. The 2020-2021 production season was the second-largest yet in terms of grains and oilseeds. In horticulture, the citrus industry had a record harvest, while other fruits and vegetables experienced a general improvement in output. In such an environment of abundant output, one would not expect a decline in the “availability” subindex. There is also no major change in agricultural infrastructure and political and social barriers to food over the past nine months compared with 2020. The only notable glitch in supply chains was during the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng unrest and even then it was short-lived.
A major issue to keep in mind when observing global agricultural indices such as Global Food Security Index is that subjectivity can never be fully eliminated from the authors’ judgment, resource constraints can hinder objective data collection on the ground in each country, and they sometimes rely on blueprint models that might not be site specific. Sources of bias can stem from the data’s inconsistency in quality, frequency and reliability across all countries. The weightings and rankings are also tricky because they have to be tailored to suit different socioeconomic contexts.
The key message is that SA should continue to improve agricultural efficiency, which will contribute to job creation and ultimately improve food security.
• Sihlobo is chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber of SA and senior fellow at Stellenbosch University’s department of agricultural economics.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.