COVID-19 has shown how damaging ill-health can be for the economy. But it has also shown how measures that benefit health (lockdowns) can be seen as bad economic prosperity. A similar paradox is at the heart of promoting better diets. Poor diet is the world’s leading cause...
COVID-19 has revealed the deep fragility of the African food system and brought to the fore prevailing systemic injustices. Some indications suggest that as many as 34% of people in South Africa have gone to bed hungry during the lockdown. In Ghana disrupted food supply chains...
Dr Chantell Witten is currently based at the University of the Free State, Faculty of Health Sciences in the division for Health Professions Education. She is a dietitian by profession and training focusing specifically on infant and young child nutrition. She completed her PHD at the...
It’s impossible to know how many people are now receiving food aid of some form in South Africa. Between countless soup kitchens, the innumerable NGOs, churches and community action networks providing food parcels along with government’s late-to-the-game food parcels, millions upon millions of hungry people...
“Many revolutions have been started not because of philosophies, but because of hunger. In Zulu we say that hunger makes people angry. It is easy to whip people into action when they are hungry.” This stark warning about the potential impact that the Covid-19 pandemic could...
A female farmer from Khayelitsha made headlines recently after advertising her fresh spinach on social media. by Erene Oberholzer A 27-year-old female farmer from Khayelitsha in Cape Town recently went viral in South Africa after wanting to ‘feed the nation one spinach at a time’. Yes, Ncumisa Mkabile went...
The Covid-19 lockdown is taking a potentially deadly toll on children, with reported child hunger on the rise and unemployment at a high. Spotlight takes an in-depth look at what this means for young children and asks the experts about potential solutions. In February, Spotlight visited...
A top level report to the Western Cape government paints a stark picture of the lockdown food crisis in some communities.One community reports: "Families are starving, struggling and urgently waiting for food hampers. The situation is very bad." Another says "hunger is going to dramatically increase...
The Minister of Finance has announced an austerity budget at a time when the fissures of unresolved historical inequality, poverty and suffering are made so much sharper. The lives of people are going to be made so much worse, at a time when redistributive and...
Government is failing its hungry children spectacularly, writes Mandy Wiener. I don't know what it feels like to be hungry - true, gnawing, hollow hunger. But what I do know is that it is a feeling I would never want myself or my children to experience. In fact, it...
By Faranaaz Veriava and Sasha Stevenson The Pretoria High Court judgment affirms that school nutrition is a component of the right to basic education. The Pretoria High Court judgment affirms that school nutrition is a component of the right to basic education. The judgment in the school nutrition...
The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that followed have disrupted private food supply chains and the public support systems the poor rely on for food and good nutrition. But these problems have also triggered many creative and entrepreneurial responses. Corinna Hawkes of the Centre for...
Hunger has increased across the board under South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdown – and new evidence indicates that parents, especially mothers, are giving their food to their kids. The National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile Survey (NIDS-CRAM) was published this week and shows that reported hunger among...
A new study suggests that a disturbing number of Eastern Cape households are going hungry, having run out of money to eat in April In Peddie in the Eastern Cape, children are eating wild plants to survive, as the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown take their...
by Ferial Haffajee Covid-19’s devastation has seen three million people lose their incomes. And almost half of all households report going hungry in the past three months, a heart-stopping new survey reveals. On 27 March, the hard lockdown was declared to try to hold off the spread...
By Gemma Ritchie for amaBhungane A bungled Sassa tender left confused service providers with warehouses full of food while also failing thousands of hungry South Africans. From November 2019 to the end of March 2020, Sassa delivered zero food parcels in six provinces despite the fact...
“The immediate impact of the public health crisis has revealed the deep fragility of the South African food system and exposed the injustices that underpin it. This has clearly been a disruption, presenting a period of deep uncertainty and change, creating an opportunity for a...
Civil society groups have played an important role in responding to the COVID-19 social crisis in South Africa. Examples include the “community action networks” in Cape Town and Gauteng, as well as similar initiatives in more rural areas, such as the Eastern Cape. They also include extraordinary crisis response efforts by...
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated both the unsustainability and the fragility of our current food system, across multiple scales. COVID-19 has proven to be the litmus test for the current industrialized food system, one that has, in certain circles, been championed as being the only...
The immediate impact of the public health crisis has revealed the deep fragility of the South African food system and exposed the injustices that underpin it. This has clearly been a disruption, presenting a period of deep uncertainty and change, creating an opportunity for a...