With unemployment on the rise, there is much debate about the long-term potential of well-designed social employment programmes, such as the Social Employment Fund (SEF). Implementing partners strongly believe in a strategy that combines the goals of providing employment, while creating pathways to address social...
Child malnutrition in the Eastern Cape should be declared a disaster in terms of the Disaster Management Act and compel the government to intervene immediately and decisively. This was the finding of the South African Human Rights Commission following its investigation into the state of...
Africa’s Green Revolution “has let us down”, not because agriculture on the continent is delivering insufficient quantities of food, but because, overall, the food that is being produced is not diverse and nutritious enough, a leading expert told a recent gathering at Stellenbosch University (SU)...
Too many food-related policies in Africa end up being nothing more than mere wish lists. These need to be turned into actionable pieces of legislation that are supported with adequate funding on a national and sub-national level....
During an African food dialogue hosted at Stellenbosch University, Professor Simba Sibanda, who leads the theme nutrition-sensitive agriculture (NSA) at the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), discussed Africa’s food systems and the disconnect between agriculture and nutrition....
Households are drowning in a relentless spiral of debt, high interest rates, various living costs increases, food price inflation, anxiety and desperation as they are forced to make impossible choices with meagre financial resources....
As appealing as it is to want to put pressure on retail giants into forgoing a small fraction of their gargantuan profits by scrapping their profit margins on essential food items, this strategy is flawed....
A new report on child poverty by the Department of Social Development (DSD) brings new data, including the fact that eight million children are not getting enough nutrition. With the constitutional duty on the state to ensure every child has ‘basic nutrition’, it will add...
With millions of children not getting enough nutrition, the DG Murray Trust’s Grow Great project has intensified its call for the government and food industry to waive mark-ups on 10 essential food items. Rising food prices are causing chronic malnutrition affecting one-quarter of South Africa’s children,...
As women are more often recruited as seasonal workers, they are not given proper training or personal protective equipment, the Women on Farms Project says....
Volunteers tackle food insecurity in Touws River by growing vegetables in home and community food gardens. It’s a town where many people are unemployed and struggling to make ends meet....
Smallholder farmers are at the periphery of the food industry and yet farmers such as Nontobeko Khanyile, in collaboration with multiple projects, prove they should be at the forefront of the fight against unsustainable farming and hunger....
UnPoison, a South African non-profit organization and civil society network working to protect public health from the harms of highly hazardous pesticides commonly used in South Africa while promoting the development of a biological solutions sector for agriculture, has just published the first publicly available list of Highly...
The reality is that nobody wins when there is widespread food insecurity in the world as this leads to social unrest, migration, and human suffering....
Professor Michael Rudolph of the Center of Ecological Intelligence is spearheading a programme of inexpensive approaches to cultivating food gardens to address food insecurity issues in South Africa....
Too many policymakers in Africa have a mindset of managing poverty, rather than of managing development. Its food system paradox isn’t grounded in a lack of agricultural resources, but in the geopolitical, financing and energy issues plaguing the continent....
The burden of hunger in Touws River is heavy, as a recent learning journey revealed. Understanding how the local food system works is crucial to stemming further socioeconomic breakdown in this and other small rural towns....
As you read this article millions of children in South Africa will be hungry. The hunger they experience, and ironically the cheap food they eat to stave it off, is causing malnutrition and undernutrition that will damage their physical and mental health, as well as...
The massive, ambitious programme offers participants - and the economy - real hope....
The Department of Health has taken another step towards making sweeping changes to food labelling in South Africa, including warnings signs on unhealthy foods....