Food For All - Mpho Putu

Mpho Putu, 2012 July

South Africa recently launched a new social protection initiative – the Food for All ”  inspired by Brazil’s “Zero Hunger strategy”. The Campaign intends to tackle some of South Africa’s most pressing social ills linked to hunger and malnutrition, especially affecting woman and children.

Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Forest – Calls it Zero hunger tolerance

Hunger and malnutrition have become an increasingly worrying concern throughout South Africa. Also, high unemployment rates, the rippling effects of HIV/AIDS and gender inequality have aggravated the problem. Additionally, more and more South Africans, especially woman and children have become the central victims of this socially and economically debilitating issue.

According to the Human Science Research Council of South Africa (HSRC), South Africa ranks among the countries with the highest rate of income inequality on the globe, in comparison to other middle income countries. Further, South Africa has resounding high levels of absolute poverty. Data shows that approximately 21.9 % of South African households have insufficient or severely insufficient access to food. Additionally, roughly 14 million South Africans are vulnerable to food insecurity. These are startling statistics, but what does this exactly imply for the most vulnerable segments of society?

Vulnerability to food insecurity signifies that millions of South Africans, especially woman and children do not know when and where their next meal will come. It can be argued that the country’s children bear the biggest brunt. Not feeding a child the appropriate amount of food coupled with the correct dosage of nutritional intake in their pivotal stages of growth, is a recipe for human developmental disaster.

According the Medical Research Council of South Africa(MRC), 33% (1,8 million) of children under six years of age suffer from vitamin A deficiency, while 21% (1,2 million) are anaemic. Further, 27% of preschool children and 34% of primary school children in a rural community in KwaZulu-Natal are zinc deficient. The impact of vitamin deficiencies such as vitamin A, iron, zinc result in learning disabilities, mental retardation, poor health, low work capacity, blindness including a slow immune response and premature death. The gloomy state of hunger and malnutrition in South Africa makes the future of the country all the more worrying. Nonetheless, South Africa’s ministry of Social Development is now forcefully gearing up to address this critical situation.

“South Africa’s new plan”

At the launch of the campaign in December in a Mmakgori village, NW, the minister of Social Development, Mrs. Bathabile Olive Dlamini stated that: Today we are launching the “Food for All Campaign” as a measure to address incidents of extreme hunger and malnutrition – also in order to restore dignity of many South Africans, including children who experience hunger.

Dignity has become a key word often used in South African post-apartheid rhetoric. Dignity in South Africa has been restored in a number of areas, especially in the political and public sphere. Nevertheless; dignity has yet to fully materialize on the ground and beyond the written cornerstones of South Africa’s democracy – the Constitution and the Freedom Charter. The intergenerational cycle of hunger and malnutrition in South Africa must be broken if dignity is to be effectively restored in the lives of every South African.

South Africa’s “Food for All Campaign” is still in its initial stages. There will undoubtedly be a range of setbacks as the country grapples with various underlining socio economic ills, but hopefully those setbacks and underlining issues will provide South Africa greater incentives and lessons in galvanizing the campaign. Further, the campaign opens doors to greater collaboration and dialogue sharing with Brazil on anti hunger and poverty programmes. Based on these reasons South Africa’s new plan to steadily address hunger and malnutrition certainly sounds promising.