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FOOD SECURITY
A farm worker at the Siphikelekhona Cooperative in KwaZulu-Natal, where the Southern Africa Food Lab is working to reconnect and recalibrate local food systems.
FOOD SAFETY AND FOOD SECURITY: A TALE OF TWO SYSTEMS
DID YOU KNOW?
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) an average of 210kg of food is wasted, per person, each year in South Africa. Of this, 44 per cent of waste comprises fruit and vegetables, with a majority wasted before reaching the supermarket shelves. The agricultural industry is a major contributing factor to food wastage in the value chain.
According to the Council for Scientifi c and Industrial Research, food waste costs South Africa R61.5-billion (2.1 per cent of GDP).
South Africa has food, but we must overcome its historical gaps, writes JAMES FRANCIS
South Africa’s inequality makes it a paradoxical place. According to Oxfam, technical famine is “a situation where one in fi ve households experience an extreme lack of food and other basic needs where starvation, death, and destitution are evident”. South Africa doesn’t quite qualify, yet around 11 per cent of its people go hungry every day, according to StatsSA, while Global Citizen reports that malnutrition stunts 27 per cent of children under-5.
A DIVIDED FOOD SECTOR
This disparity is historical, says Rirhandzu Marivate, project manager of the Sustainability Institute’s Learning Farm project. “South Africa’s food system was set up by the colonial settlers; it was exclusionary to the native Africans and later continued by the apartheid government. The food system was designed to serve and be accessed by the minority population, while poorly paid black labourers were only able to access a very small portion of the food supply and were further conditioned to depend on refi ned staples and poor diets.”
Though this image has changed somewhat since 1994, Marivate notes that the loosening of regulations also enabled a few large players to consolidate their position and “promote large-scale industrial monoculture, instead of creating a more equitable and accessible food system”.
Kenneth Carden, programme head for supporting smallholder agriculture at the Southern Africa Food Lab, agrees, noting that there is a formal entrenched commercial sector and a struggling, previously disadvantaged, smallholder agricultural sector, which “manifests in a highly developed commercial food system dominated by a few powerful players that supply readily available food into the more affl uent consumer base, and a less-developed largely informal food system that a high percentage of consumers depend on.”
NO FOOD CONSPIRACY
To be clear, this is not due to a food cabal, but rather the symptom of long-standing segregation in the food market. And the large players are not plotting to keep small producers down. For example, Woolworths is a big supporter of feeding schemes, food reclamation, and teaching sustainable agriculture skills to smallholding farmers, through its support of the Learning Farm project and its Farming for the Future project.
“At farm level, Farming for the Future aims to increase the quality of the food produced, reduce food waste, and build resilience against climate change while improving the ecosystem,” says Woolworths spokesperson Silindile Gumede.
Retailers appear to play a growing role in establishing the best standards and practices among smallholder farms. This includes food safety – Woolworths employs teams that enforce food safety protocols and do regular testing to ensure their compliance. It also helps to develop subsistence farmers to become part of its supplier programme.
Though welcome, such activities aren’t altruistic. They need to happen if we hope to address food inequality, says Marivate. “Big corporates or businesses hold the power at the different points in the food value chain, and they can use that power to ensure that smaller businesses that are underrepresented, including the informal sector, are given access and allowed to participate.”
SAFETY AND SECURITY FOR EVERYONE
The food sector is also under pressure from customers and modern technology enablement, says Japie van der Westhuizen, GM of SA Stud Book & The Animal Improvement Association: “It is mainly from the end consumer, but also animal welfare groups, groups insisting on environmental sustainability and even religionbased beliefs. The openness of databases, the rapid growth in accessibility to information and maybe even the infl uence of social media all contribute to this. The integration of production chains and the need for every link in this chain are also contributing.”
Another reason for the gap is compliance with local and global safety standards. These pressures can marginalise the informal food sector where demand for food availability overrides other sentiments. Since retailers turn the screws on behalf of food safety regulations, informal providers must become familiar with best practices, says Carden.
“Such food safety standards are generally not in place in the less formal food system. In recent work undertaken among groups of small-scale farmers who generally supply into the less formal system, we have found varying degrees of food safety knowledge and discovered that there are big issues with disease management and the use of pesticides.”
There are successes – Carden cites the SPAR Rural Hub programme, which has helped several small-scale farmers achieve GlobalG.A.P (good agricultural practice) compliance. But much more can be done. To this end, Marivate says the State can infl uence matters considerably. “Government has the ability and biggest responsibility to change laws and policies that enable fairer, inclusive, diverse and resilient food systems by creating legislation that protects the right to food and gives greater power to people and businesses that have little infl uence over how the food system works.”
Breadline Africa’s emergency feeding programme provides 20 000 meals per week to impoverished communities.
HELPING KIDS STAY ABOVE THE BREADLINE
The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily impacted South Africa’s most impoverished communities. Since March 2020, nongovernmental organisation (NGO) Breadline Africa has helped to provide 1.7 million meals across 85 communities. It currently supports 12 feeding sites, catering 20 000 meals a week, with its primary focus on young children.
Founded in 1993, Breadline Africa, is not primarily a food provider. It focuses on dispersing grants and developing infrastructure around South Africa. If an underserved early childhood development (ECD) centre or primary school needs a classroom, restroom, kitchen or similar facilities, Breadline and its partners work to deliver a container fi tted for that purpose. Instead of long-term projects, it chases more real-time results.
“I’ve worked for other NGOs that do long-term projects,” says Breadline Africa’s director Marion Wagner. “These are great projects, but they take years to fi nish. But if an informal structure is falling down and it’s unsafe for children trying Marion to learn to be in it, we can Wagner replace it relatively quickly with a container that would otherwise have been left to rust.”
Breadline Africa is no stranger to feeding schemes, deploying its fi rst container kitchen in 1995. To date, it has launched 113 kitchens, and its partners help to register preschools so
When South Africa grew hungrier, Breadline Africa turned its scope towards food, writes JAMES FRANCIS
that they can access government funding, such as Department of Social Development child subsidies.
But the lockdowns meant many ECD facilities were closed. Realising that this would have a terrible effect on children’s development, Breadline Africa reached out to its partners and those with kitchens, asking if they need help in providing meals?
The NGO could focus its organisation, fundraising and logistics capacities towards the immediate need for food. This helped Breadline and its partners deliver 71 000kgs of food to the needy in the fi rst fi ve months of lockdown. Breadline Africa has stringent evaluation criteria when it comes to placing infrastructure. ECD projects must have educational outcomes and not be run for pure profi t. Some have become real entrepreneurs by combining an ECD centre with a laundromat with access to a toy library. Feeding kitchens at schools replaced community feeding kitchens, which often run out of funding, and can connect to national feeding schemes.
Since the start of lockdown, Breadline Africa has provided over 1,7 million meals to people in need.
“We deliver dry ingredients and fresh vegetables and the community organisations cook and distribute the meals. We vet them and ensure that they are capable of monitoring and reporting and tracking.”
Breadline Africa doesn’t style itself as a food NGO. It’s more of a fi xer, working behind the scenes with different partners to meet educational infrastructure needs in impoverished communities. When the pandemic crunch came, it could use that capability to fi ll an astounding number of stomachs. This underscores that in transforming South Africa, separately, we are willing but limited, yet together, we can realise a better country.
THE FEEDING-SAFETY NEXUS
The South African Government’s National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP) brings meals to schoolchildren in primary and secondary schools. The spike in hungry people due to the pandemic lockdowns was partly because they couldn’t access this programme – a vital lifeline. The NSNP makes it a priority to buy fresh produce from smallholder farms, yet its patronage is also subject to meeting food production safety standards.
Thus, only farmers who can meet the criteria can gain access to a large customer and support a highly valuable service to South Africans. The work of groups such as the Sustainability Institute and Southern Africa Food Lab aims to connect these dots and introduce informal and small-scale farmers into the commercial food economy.
