From 2002, the national statistical agency began to ask its household respondents in the General Household Survey “whether, and how often adults and children went hungry because there was not enough food in the household”. The responses to these questions over time reflect the degree of food insecurity observed in SA, a net food exporter. On the aggregate at least. So too do they reflect the institutional experience of administering large-scale welfare programmes to overcome food insecurity.
Nearly a third (29.3%) of respondents in 2002 said they experienced food insecurity. The number dropped remarkably to just above a tenth (11.1%) of the sample by 2019. Yet something happened during the pandemic such that by 2023, 15% of respondents suggested that their households were food insecure. Two related reasons may partly explain the shift. Focused interventions, to protect primarily children from want and need, have changed these relative perceptions of hunger. One reason the number of respondents, and their perceptions of their hunger and that of their children, changed has to do with the National School Nutrition Programme.
After a January 2003 cabinet decision (after the approval of the Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Programme) to implement a school nutrition scheme, by 2012 more than
9-million pupils in quintile 1-3 schools in the basic education sphere were receiving free meals, up from just more than 7-million in 2009, a few years after the programme was launched. More than 10-million learners receive meals, according to the February budget this year. By 2026, more than R11bn will be spent annually to sustain and extend this programme.
The second, is the extension of the child (and other) support grants to many more households over the past two decades. In the Eastern Cape, Free State and Limpopo such grants constitute a third of total household income. While a concerningly high figure reflecting chronic underemployment in these areas, one cannot avoid how important a driver that grants have been of the rise in discretionary incomes that have buoyed poorer households in a hostile food system and alienating labour market.
What then gave rise to growing food insecurity in 2019-23? The Covid-19 “shock” on formal non-agricultural employment (let alone informal work) was significant. Between the last quarter of 2019 and that of 2020, more than 440,000 jobs were lost, some irrecoverable. So too did food prices rise. The National Agricultural Marketing Council compiles a 28-item food basket for urban households. The cost of this “monthly basket” rose from R879.38 in April 2019 to R1,170.47 four years later. Across the Southern African region, deep droughts, infrequent rainfall and premature deindustrialisation have made food insecurity a “regional matter” with wide-ranging spillovers as the migration debate increasingly shows. Further afield, conflict, climate risks and commodity trader impulses have wrought havoc on food and energy prices, making food and energy insecurity sides of the same coin in the unfolding global cost-of-living crisis.
As SA prepares in two weeks to preside over the Group of Twenty (G20) for 2025, we may have another opportunity to not only draw on our institutional experience of “mass programmes” against food insecurity, but also to reflect on how to use multilateral “policy space” to amplify existing and new positions from the Global South to confront food insecurity. These might include “regional” emergency food stocks, speculation, export bans, supply chain constraints, ecological crises and price risks from geopolitical conflict. They could also complement existing and new social wage programmes. Such programmes — as the next column in two weeks on public stockholding will show — may also be geared towards providing meaningful support to smallholder farmers and poorer households, and may with it serve as a point of harmonising our industrial and agrarian interests.
• Cawe is chief commissioner at the International Trade Administration Commission. He writes in his personal capacity.
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