South Africa has committed itself to achieving eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, and arguably the chief determinant among these is food security.
That’s because human development is dependent on human health. And good health is dependent on good nutrition. Yet, initiatives that seek to support marginalised and poor communities’ food security appear to be left to gather up the crumbs under the CSI funding table.
The lion’s share of CSI funding locally is channelled into education, health and HIV, and social and community development, understandably.
However, food security — as a class of development project — falls seventh on the list after enterprise development and the environment. It would seem that the powerful dual impact of food security projects is being overlooked, or much misunderstood.
First, the provision of support for community food security initiatives allows development workers a direct and tangible way to support the basic and immediate welfare needs of a targeted community. A feeding scheme allows poor and malnourished people access to good, nutritious food for as close to free as possible.
Second, best practice food security projects have also recognised that building sustainability into their operating model means building self-sufficiency into the package for each beneficiary. Teaching the poor and malnourished how to cultivate their own nutritious food is both the most noble and the most cost-effective food security intervention.
But creating the right environment for those who wish to take up the skills learnt — to establish and care for their own food garden as part of a new lifestyle — requires the provision of basic farmer support (having a local presence providing information, expertise and, possibly, collectively bargained discount inputs and collectively bargained marketing channels, where possible).
Among local CSI funders over the past while there has been a failure to recognise that food security projects require sustained ongoing and uninterrupted support. All too often a project is funded just long enough to see the food garden established — without ensuring that the requisite support structures that need to exist to support the micro-farmer are in place and are themselves sustainable.
As select instances across the country are demonstrating, longterm funding support is producing real, deep and meaningful change in the lives of beneficiaries:
- Entrenching a culture of growing one’s own food, sustainably and productively;
- Providing good, healthy produce to your immediate community at a fair price;
- Increasing your community’s food security; and
- Reducing your community’s carbon footprint.
We need a countrywide movement in support of home and community food gardening, and the movement needs patrons who are in it for the long term. Every community deserves and should have an opportunity to engage with the possibilities that food gardening brings. This reach requires much greater levels of investment and commitment from both public and private social investors.
Designed expertly, managed efficiently and funded earnestly, food security projects in South Africa will lay the foundation of a prosperous nation for all. The seemingly out-of-place ugly duckling will, in time and with support, grow to be the swan.
Graeme Wilkinson is a CSI Practitioner at Tshikululu Social Investments