South Africa ranked 59th out of 113 countries and first out of 28 Sub-Saharan African countries in the Economist Impact Global Food Security Index in 2022. (File photo)
Spiralling food inflation and high levels of personal debt have resulted in South Africans facing worse food insecurity than a decade ago, with hunger leading to one in four children in poor households being stunted.
This is according to two new reports released this week, which show that households are sacrificing food budgets by reducing access to a variety of nutritious foods to pay for energy, transport and debt.
According to the South African Food Security Index 2024, developed by University of Stellenbosch economists Dieter von Fintel and Dr Anja Smith, published by Africa’s largest food retailer the Shoprite Group, food security is at its lowest point in over a decade.
The new index evaluates four dimensions of food security: availability, access, use and overall stability, from 2012 to 2023, and creates a baseline to measure food security in South Africa annually using publicly available and updated data.
Von Fintel, presenting the findings of the study at a media briefing this week, said the food security index — where 100 represents excellent security and 0 reflects severe insecurity — had declined over the past decade.
Drought in 2015-16 had affected food production, causing the index to plummet to 57.1 from 52.4 in 2012 during the period after the global financial crisis.
“Shortly after that, there was a very good recovery, and in around 2018 to 2019, the Food Security Index peaked at 64.6. Just as we were recovering from the previous shocks, Covid-19 hit us, and the pandemic really created problems for food security in South Africa,” Von Fintel said.
As lockdown started, the Food Security Index dropped to 56.7 and this intensified until 2023 when it dropped to 45.3.
“It wasn’t just lockdown that was causing these problems,” he said.
“Inflationary pressures are a real problem for South Africa and the world at large, which came from food supply issues internationally, such as the Ukraine war preventing food entering South Africa and other countries in the world, but also continued droughts, which have affected the ability of local producers to produce sufficient food,” he said.
Von Fintel said South Africa’s nutrition performance was not aligned to its level of economic development in terms of outcomes, such as stunting.
South Africa ranked 59th out of 113 countries and first out of 28 Sub-Saharan African countries in the Economist Impact Global Food Security Index in 2022. However, while South Africa outperforms its African peers, it performs below its economic peers, such as Brazil.
“Hunger is persistent in South Africa. We saw this as the Covid-19 crisis was panning out, that hunger rates were increasing, and hunger is the first step to [measure] nutrition, because it suggests that we have food to eat in the first place,” Von Fintel said.
However, he said that while raw food availability declined from 2.8 tonnes per person per year in 2017 to 2.6 tonnes in 2022, which was still sufficient food for a healthy diet, the number of people not meeting their minimum calorie requirements had declined, although enough food is still available. In 2001, 1.8 million people did not have sufficient access to food to meet their needs and this increased to 4.7 million people in 2021.
There was also a decrease in crop yields in 2023, which was expected to deteriorate further in 2024 because of ongoing drought, while geopolitical instability also played a role in food availability.
Von Fintel said apart from availability, households also faced challenges such as unemployment and affordability of food.
“We still have a problem that one in 10 households have children that experience hunger. If we focus on the poorest households, this figure means that one in four children in the poorest households go hungry,” he said.
“Household socio-economic status is one of the driving factors of whether children go hungry or not, and it determines food access. Do people have enough money to buy food?”
He said the study suggested that, nationally, South Africa is food secure but households are not food secure and do not have access to the variety of nutritious meals which would allow them to function optimally at work and school.
“Hunger is much higher in rural areas. The risk factor is because … jobs are very scarce in rural areas, which means affordability of food is a real problem. We also see that hunger rates are much higher when women head households compared to men,” Von Fintel said.
“Similar to hunger, households are reporting that they cannot afford the variety of food which they would like to have and that this alarming figure is on the increase. By 2023, almost one quarter of households, 23.6%, were consuming less variety of food due to economic constraints,” he said.
He said this was probably an understatement, because households are not aware of the variety of foods needed for a healthy diet.
“But, interestingly, this figure corresponds quite closely to the figure of one in four children being growth stunted, and this really is one of our main signals of the fact that we don’t have the kind of nutrients going to all households in South Africa, allowing them to function within daily life,” he said.
The country was still recovering from the economic hardship and job losses brought about during the Covid-19 era, while inflationary pressure remained a problem.
“Food inflation is far more rapid than general inflation and households have diverted their incomes to coping with other financial needs and therefore have had to sacrifice their food budgets. Even though households might have enough food, they would start buying cheaper foods that might be less nutritious,” Von Fintel said.
However, he said, there are concrete steps that can be taken to confront food insecurity. For example, affordable, accessible foods that can be provided to children by caregivers to help avoid stunting, including chicken livers; tinned fish such as sardines; eggs and chicken; peanut butter; milk, maas and plain, unsweetened yoghurt; dark green leafy vegetables such as spinach or indigenous green leaves and yellow, orange and deep red vegetables and fruit, such as carrots, tomatoes, pumpkin, sweet potato, apricots and mangoes.
He said these foods should be VAT zero-rated to make them affordable, funding should be provided to communities to develop food gardens and nutritional interventions during the first 1 000 days of children’s lives must be prioritised.
“Stakeholders need to be mobilised at multiple levels — national, meso-level and local level. Ultimately, very targeted interventions are needed to support the nutrition of young children to prevent stunting and other illnesses. This should include the provision of appropriate protein-rich food at early childhood development centres, as well as at early learning programmes,” he said.
Shoprite Group chief sustainability officer Sanjeev Raghubir said one of the most concerning observations was that child hunger remains a major issue and that a quarter of children are stunted.
He said while the index highlights that food security could worsen over the next decade if immediate interventions are not implemented, it also showed that South Africa has drastically reduced hunger levels in the past.
“The findings of the South African Food Security Index 2024 add further fuel to our daily obsession with affordability and accessibility to ensure that our most price-sensitive customers can put food on the table,” Raghubir said.
The Altron FinTech Household Resilience Index (AFHRI) for the second quarter of 2024, released on Wednesday, highlights the negative impact high interest rates have had on consumer finances, raising the average household debt-cost burden to its highest level in 15 years.
Economist Roelof Botha, who compiles the index on behalf of Altron FinTech, believes the South African Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee’s restrictive stance had come at “a huge cost to the economy”.
“One of the most worrying trends in the latest AFHRI is the year-on-year decline of 3.3% in the ratio of household income to debt costs.
“Merely two years ago, in the first quarter of 2022, households were sacrificing 6.7% of their disposable incomes to pay for debt costs. This ratio has since increased by 36%, with households now having to spend 9.1% of their disposable incomes on servicing debt,” Botha said.