Barry Streek
South Africa should introduce a food voucher scheme to ensure low-paid workers and their families can use smart cards to buy food apart from their cash earnings the Women’s Development Bank (WDB) has urged.
Food vouchers could ensure food security in a country where 73% of all households receive monthly incomes of less than R2 500 and 14-million people live in poverty, the WDB told Parliament’s portfolio committee on social development.
WDB executive director Tania Slabbert said the scheme would initially target workers earning less than R2 500 a month.
The scheme proposes that the government creates an environment that provides incentives to companies to grant additional income in a currency only exchangeable for food and introduce legislation to grant tax advantages to employers issuing food vouchers to staff.
Slabbert said in Brazil 11-million people use the vouchers daily, while a similar system was introduced in Britain in the 1950s.
It is currently used in 31 countries.
Slabbert said although food voucher schemes have been implemented in a variety of ways, a local system would have to be negotiated in South Africa.
“There is rapidly spreading acceptance of food vouchers as a poverty-alleviation tool in the developing world,” she said.
However, the system is open to abuse, typically among dishonest retailers who discount vouchers for cash. To stem such possible abuse, checks and balances would have to be introduced and the WDB consortium believes that these could be limited by the use of smart cards.
Slabbert used the example of industrial canteens or meal vouchers for workers to illustrate her point that an adequately fed worker is likely to be more productive and that through food vouchers food security could be attained for millions of families living below the breadline.
She said the proposed system is consistent with the provision of the Constitution that “every person has the right to have access to sufficient food” and that the government must “take reasonable and other measures within its available resources to achieve the progressive realisation of this right”.
Slabbert said once a system has been put in place to deliver food security to workers and their families, “the mechanism can be extended to the unemployed, single mothers as well as pensioners”.
Slabbert’s consortium consists of Women’s Development Banking Investment Holdings (Pty) Ltd, the Disability Employment Concerns Trust (established by seven national NGOs) and the French-controlled firm Accor SA.
Once adopted, the system would roll out a network of smart-card readers in supermarkets and shops around the country. In the remote areas where there is no fixed telecommunications infrastructure, “the cellphone network would be used to enable even the remotest spaza shops to become part of the network”.
Slabbert said such a network would facilitate other government services, such as pension payments, disability grants, Unemployment Insurance Fund entitlements and the basic income grant.
She said a food allowance of R2,5-billion R220 a month granted to one million people would cost the government about R360-million a year in taxes forfeited and “for each additional R1 given to workers through food vouchers, the forfeiture of taxes will represent 15c for the state”.