GreaterGood South Africa

Food security in a time of crisis
Tuesday, October 6th 2009

A billion hungry people. On 16 October, World Food Day, that is the statistic that we should all keep in mind. This year, for the first time, the number of undernourished people in the world has topped the one billion mark. The theme for this year’s World Food Day is Achieving Food Security in a Time of Crisis, an acknowledgement that when one in six people in the world do not have enough food, the problem is too big to ignore – financial crisis or no financial crisis.

South Africa and the world

South Africa has been particularly vulnerable to increases in the number of hungry people. High unemployment rates, an inadequate social welfare system, high HIV/AIDS infection rates and the escalating prices of food have all contributed to food insecurity. According to the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), around 14 million people in South Africa are vulnerable to food insecurity. In recognition of the scale and urgency of this problem, Western Cape Premiere Helen Zille gave up some of her time on Do It Day, to help FoodBank make sandwiches and distribute food to some underprivileged Cape Town schools.

The food security situation in South Africa is in many ways a microcosm of the situation globally. According to the United Nations, the world, like South Africa, is able to produce enough food to feed its entire population. And yet, like South Africa, there is a dual system where some have more than they could possibly use, while others struggle to meet their most basic needs. Initiatives like FoodBank are trying to make the supply-chain of food more efficient by acting as an intermediary between people with a food surplus and those who cannot secure enough food for themselves. It provides a central point for farmers, distributors, retailers and individuals to donate their surplus, and then channels this food to agencies according to the specific needs of the people they serve.

From food aid to food security

Traditional approaches to tackling hunger followed a simple logic: those that are hungry need to be fed. Feeding the hungry might seem like the rational response; in some cases where the need is most urgent it might be the only possible response. However, seeing that handing out a billion meals would give each malnourished person in the world only one meal, the question that needs to be asked this World Food Day is not “How do we feed the hungry?” but “How do we empower the hungry to secure enough food to feed themselves?” . This shift in thinking represents the move from food aid to food security.

The dramatic rise in food prices in 2007 and 2008 saw a big emphasis placed on controlling food prices, and globally emergency measures were adopted to reign in the spiralling cost of basic foodstuffs. But as these prices stabilise, we should be cautious of efforts that simply target the price of food. In the words of Joachi von Braun, the Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI): “Progress in achieving global food security should not be measured by declines in food prices, but by significant reductions in the number of poor, hungry, and malnourished people.”

Breaking cycles of poverty and hunger

Securing food is critical to development and poverty alleviation. Without food, people cannot carry out activities that will keep them out of poverty. Conversely, poverty fuels food insecurity, creating a destructive cycle of impoverishment and hunger.

Breaking out of this cycle requires large-scale efforts that treat economic empowerment and food security as two sides of the same coin, knowing that healthily-fed people are better-equipped to take advantage of economic opportunities, and that economically-empowered people are better-equipped to have a healthy diet. Initiatives that give people the power to take control of their own food security and their own economic destiny do so by promoting sustainable farming methods and by establishing cooperatives among small-scale rural farmers. They assist rural farmers in getting access to land and uplift them economically so that they have access to markets that would otherwise be out of reach.

It is these kinds of initiatives that make it possible to achieve food security in a time of economic crisis, and for one billion reasons, they deserve our support.

Read our SASIX sector research on food security and agriculture

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