SA's shameful hunger epidemic — we need to move beyond donation to legislation

Daily Maverick

5 days ago

In rural South Africa, women in their sixties are borrowing money from loan sharks to feed their families. Grown men are trying to last for entire days on a single meal from a neighbourhood community kitchen.
Children are arriving at school too food deprived to concentrate on their lessons – desperately holding on until lunchtime, when their free school meal provides their only regular source of nourishment.
These are the daily realities of a large number of South Africans. It's shameful, because it is an insult to our fellow citizens that they are forced to scratch around, humbling themselves to find food, in a country that produces more than enough to feed everyone every day.
An unjust reality
The Bill of Rights in the Constitution, in sections 27 (1) b and 28 (1) c, guarantees our people the right to adequate food and water.
It's a violation of these rights that so many of our people go hungry. Hunger reduces their ability to function as fully actualised human beings, to care for their families, learn, work, grow, live and love those around them. And this injustice happens at an enormous scale.
Springbok rugby captain Siya Kolisi, who grew up in a poor Eastern Cape community, describes the all-encompassing impact of hunger.
'Being hungry is easy and commonplace,' he writes. 'Hunger is different. It's all-consuming. It was all I could feel and all I could think about. My stomach seemed to twist in on itself, and the more I tried to ignore the pain there, the worse it got.'
The Unicef Child Food Poverty 2024 Report states that 23% of South African children live with just such a debilitating experience – severe food poverty. Fully 37% – more than a third – of our children suffer from 'moderate' food poverty.
As we mark World Hunger Day on 28 May, it is critical that we highlight the causes of this deeply unjust and offensive reality, which confronts vast numbers of our people daily.
Those causes are systemic. Because of food industry business models, distribution methods and restrictive legislation, one-third of all the food produced in South Africa – ten million tonnes – goes to waste each year. This is the equivalent of 40 billion meals, in a context where 20 billion meals are needed to provide all of South Africa's hungry people with three meals a day for a year.
Innovative solutions
FoodForward South Africa (FFSA) works closely with our food system partners to address this senseless waste. Our food banking model connects a world of excess to a world of need, by recovering quality edible surplus food from the consumer goods supply chain and distributing it to community organisations that provide life-saving services in underserved communities.
We have made significant progress. In the 2024/25 financial year we distributed 83 million meals through our food banking model, reaching 935,000 vulnerable people daily via a network of 2,500 vetted beneficiary organisations across South Africa. Thanks to support from our food and financial donors, our partners and volunteers, we have been able to achieve a cost per meal of only R0,50 – proving that this model is scalable.
We constantly develop new, innovative solutions, making a material difference in communities across the country. One such solution is our digital platform called FoodShare, which manages our Virtual Foodbanking (VFB) module. VFB connects our beneficiary organisations to local retail stores for the regular collection of surplus food. Woolworths, PnP, Spar and Food Lover's Market stores all use FoodShare to ensure their surplus food that is still edible but not selling goes to local communities, and thousands of tonnes of waste is avoided.
In the Eastern and Western Cape we launched the Mother and Child Nutrition Programme with the Philani Maternal, Child Health and Nutrition Trust and Grow Great, providing nutritious food parcels to pregnant women and children who have been identified as at risk or malnourished. FFSA provides nutritious food for the whole family, until the mother and/or child gains the necessary weight to live healthily.
Our Food Gardens Connect programme provides training to unemployed people in 10 underserved communities. We show people how to grow their own food and give them a starter kit and other inputs; like seedlings. We also offer a guaranteed buy-back of all the produce they grow, so they can earn an income. The programme provides skills, sustenance and new income streams for people in these communities.
Systemic causes
However, committed as we are to these programmes, the fact remains that food insecurity is a systemic injustice. For that reason, addressing it requires systemic change.
Our #RepurposeTheSurplus campaign is dedicated to introducing behavioural change across the food system, while lobbying the government for legislative change. Our goals include the finalisation of a South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) South African National Standard (SANS) for Food Donation – a first for South Africa and the continent. FFSA is on this working group, and we are close to finalising this standard, which food system actors can use to donate food safely.
Our second goal is to develop a Food Donations Bill that relaxes the often overstrict safety liability of food donors and redistribution organisations and clarifies the fact that donated food remains safe after the 'sell by' or 'best before' dates. These dates can be misleading and can affect the amount of food that is either wasted or donated by food producers and retailers.
The proposed Bill would revise labelling guidelines to encourage the donation of food beyond its 'best before' date and make food donation common practice.
In France, a similar law – the 2016 'Garot Law' – mandated that unsold food products from retail stores that are still safe for consumption must be donated, rather than discarded. The outcome has been hugely positive, with nearly 28% more food rescued in France within the first two years of the law being passed. Countries like Italy, Paraguay, Pakistan and the US are all moving towards donating food to reduce the impact of food loss and waste on the environment.
Integrated interventions
The FFSA model is strategic and scalable and has made a difference to the lives of millions of food-insecure South Africans. But ultimately, if we want this year's World Hunger Day to herald a seismic change, we need to rethink the entire approach to food donation.
We need systemic, integrated interventions that address the root causes. These will require:
Policy and legislative reforms that support food recovery and redistribution;
Collaborative partnerships between the government, the private sector and nonprofit organisations in creating sustainable food systems; and
Active involvement from individuals, businesses and organisations in supporting efforts to build a food-secure nation.
The need for action is urgent. Thanks to economic and geopolitical trends, inequalities are growing. Climate change is having severe impacts on our food system and we are not making sufficient progress towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.
We need to act decisively on a national, strategic level to create a sustainable food system where no South African must be less of a person because they must live with the debilitating pain of being food insecure. DM