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Daily Maverick
29-05-2025
- General
- Daily Maverick
SA's shameful hunger epidemic — we need to move beyond donation to legislation
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
Daily Maverick
08-05-2025
- Health
- Daily Maverick
Ending hunger: A call for legislative action on food waste in South Africa
To be successful in addressing food insecurity and malnutrition in South Africa, the broadest possible consultation will be required across the food system, including with farmers and agri-business food manufacturers, retailers, the non-profit organisation (NPO) sector and, crucially, the government. The commitment by Gauteng Department of Agriculture MEC Vuyiswa Ramakgopa to ending hunger in Gauteng — and in South Africa as a whole — is most encouraging. Her 'Ending Hunger Symposium' held in early April 2025 was a powerful show of her genuine interest in collaboration among all the many civil society and government organisations that are fighting the hunger crisis in South Africa. The Union Against Hunger (UAH), a recently launched movement that aims to pull together the efforts of the myriad organisations and individuals fighting to end hunger, along with FoodForward South Africa and SA Harvest, are committed to working closely with Ramakgopa and her department to build this collaborative effort. FoodForward SA, South Africa's largest food redistribution organisation, understands that, since food insecurity and malnutrition affects millions of vulnerable households each month, addressing these challenges requires the combination of systemic intervention involving the government, the private sector, and civil society. The right to food The foundation of the right to food in South Africa is the enshrinement of that right in the South African Constitution. Broadly speaking, section 27(1) (b) of the Bill of Rights states that everyone living in South Africa has the right to enough food and water, while Section 28(1)(c) states that every child has the right to basic nutrition. It is abundantly clear that the government has failed in its responsibility to honour its obligations in relation to the right to food. It is unacceptable that in our country, which produces more than enough food to feed all its people, more than 29% of our children up to the age of five are stunted as a result of severe acute malnutrition; up to 20 million South Africans are on a spectrum of severe food vulnerability ranging from running out of money to feed their families at some point during the month, to millions of children going to sleep hungry every night. Up to 65% of South African women and about 40% of men are overweight or obese because of the general unaffordability of nutritious foods. The government must urgently set in motion the realisation of its constitutional obligations with respect to sections 27 and 28. This demand is also expressed constitutionally: Section 7(2) of the Constitution imposes an obligation on the state to 'respect, protect, promote and fulfil' all rights in the Bill of Rights, which obviously includes the right to food. Make dumping edible food illegal — a low-hanging solution It is globally accepted that legislation concerning various aspects of the food ecosystem would make a massive — and relatively quick — difference to ending hunger in South Africa, and the place to begin is by making the dumping of edible food illegal, a measure that has precedent, and has achieved great success in countries such as Italy and France. One-third of food produced in South Africa — ten million tons — goes to waste each year. This is equivalent of 40 billion meals, in a context where 20 billion meals are needed to feed all of South Africa's hungry people three meals a day for a year. It is difficult to estimate the quantum of food that is currently being saved from the food chain but, suffice it to say that if legislation increased the food saved from going to landfill by just 5% per annum, two billion additional nutritious meals per annum would become available. Legislation and incentive schemes to reduce food waste have made a palpable difference globally. One well known example is France's 2016 'Garot Law' , which mandates, inter alia, that unsold food products from retail stores that are still safe for consumption must be donated rather than discarded. This includes measures such as that supermarkets larger than 400 square metres are required to sign agreements with food redistribution organisations to donate unsold food, and that supermarkets are obliged to keep records of their food donations and provide annual reports on the amount of food wasted and donated (tax incentives or penalties apply). If a similar law were legislated in South Africa, farmers, manufacturers and retailers would be obliged (by the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, which is responsible for drafting the current food waste reduction policy) to make agreements with food redistribution organisations (e.g. SA Harvest and Food Forward SA). This would ensure that the cost of handling and transporting donated food was not a barrier for redistribution organisations, and that tax incentives were provided for farmers, manufacturers and retailers. These incentives would include reductions in their income tax based on the value of the food donations they have made. In South Africa, in addition to the mandates such as those included in the Garot Law, two key actions that we believe are required. First, a Food Donations Bill that, inter alia, relaxes the often over-strict safety liability of food donors and redistribution organisations and clarifies date marking ('sell by' dates), which can be misleading, as they often suggest a much shorter 'safety' window for a product), which severely hampers the quantum of food that can be donated by food producers. Second, a Food Donations Bill should revise the front-of-pack labelling guidelines issued by the health department, encouraging the donation of food that has passed its 'best before' date. (Editor's note: draft new front-of-pack labelling guidelines have been under review for more than two years.) Rescued food Since the Garot Law was passed in 2016, according to independent research carried out for SA Harvest, the law has been effective in increasing the amount of food rescued by nearly 28% (from 36-million to 46-million kilogrammes) in its first two years. Ultimately, to be successful in addressing food insecurity and malnutrition in South Africa, the broadest possible consultation will be required across the food system, including with farmers and agri-business food manufacturers, retailers, the non-profit organisation sector and, crucially, the government. Critical to this process is that the government creates a Food and Nutrition Security Council (which has been promised since 2018) in order to (1) onboard strategic partners (2) strategically carve out an approach to solutions, and (3) develop key performance indicators and metrics, as well as define who will be responsible for measuring success, and for reporting on the council's actions and progress. As Dr Tracy Ledger, who leads the Just Transition programme at the Public Affairs Research Institute and is one of South Africa's leading food activists, asks: 'Why is it that food prices are so high that millions of South African families go hungry, while the prices paid to farmers for the same food are so low that many cannot stay in business? Why are the people who produce our food — farmworkers — among the most insecure of all? Why do high levels of rural poverty persist while corporate profits in the food sector keep rising? How did a country with enough food for all and a constitutional right to food become a place where more than one in four children is malnourished and classified as stunted?' Obtaining the answers to these questions is what Ramakgopa has set in motion. 'We will find the answers through a collaborative effort, and we will ensure that, based on these answers, we will implement the appropriate actions,' she said. 'After all, quality research and market intelligence are worth nothing without action, and I am dedicated to showing that genuine care, in the case of our people, is a 'doing' word.' DM
