South Africa is in a better place regarding food security when compared with various countries in the world. (David Harrison)
I recently said on X that South Africa is food secure at a national level but has a major household food insecurity problem.
One of the measures researchers often use to evaluate the food security condition of each country relative to the world is The Economist’s Global Food Security Index.
In 2022, South Africa ranked 59th out of 113 countries and was the most food secure in sub-Saharan Africa. This is an improvement from the previous year’s ranking of 70th. South Africa ranked the second most food-secure country in the African continent after Morocco.
The Global Food Security Index comprises four sub-indices: 1) food affordability, 2) food availability, 3) food quality and safety, and 4) sustainability and adaptation.
The affordability and availability subindices carry a combined weighting of two-thirds of the total index. The affordability sub-index includes the change in average food costs, agricultural trade, food safety net programmes, proportion of population under the global poverty line, and funding for food safety net programmes.
The availability sub-index includes the sufficiency of supply, access to inputs, agricultural research and development, farm infrastructure, supply chain infrastructure, food loss, and political and social barriers to food.
In 2022, South Africa experienced a mild deterioration in the food affordability sub-index of seven points. The rest of the other subindices improved significantly.
This decline in the affordability sub-index is unsurprising because the country witnessed a broad acceleration in consumer food price inflation since the start of the year. It averaged 9,5% year-on-year in 2022, from 6.5% up from in 2021. Food inflation was also elevated in 2023, averaging at 11%.
In 2024, however, we saw market deceleration, with South Africa’s food inflation averaging 4.8% in the first eight months of the year.
Importantly, the higher food inflation in 2022 and 2023 was a global issue and not unique to South Africa.
But, in an environment such as South Africa with higher unemployment, the effects of food inflation shocks tend to be more severely felt by consumers.
Over the past few years, several factors have added upward pressure on global food prices.
First, the drought in South America in the 2019-20 season reduced the harvest, primarily in Brazil and Argentina. These countries collectively account for 14% and 50% of global maize and soybean production. The drought has persisted for roughly three seasons, further exacerbating the grain price increases from 2020 to 2022.
Second, China’s imports of grains and oilseed as the country rebuilt its pork industry after a devastating African swine fever also added to the surge in demand at a time when global stocks were tight. China’s growing demand had a consequential effect on global grain prices because of its share size of imports, which is about 60% of globally traded soybeans.
As Covid-19 spread in early 2020, several major grain producers such as India, Kazakhstan and Vietnam worsened global price increases by temporarily banning exports. As this unfolded, shipping costs soared, increasing global grain prices further. In sum, a combination of trade policy actions by other countries, logistics and weather conditions placed upward pressure on food prices.
These problems were further worsened by the Russia-Ukraine war. Russia and Ukraine are substantial players in the grains and oilseeds market. The former produces about 10% of global wheat, while Ukraine accounts for 4%. Together, the two countries account for a quarter of global wheat exports.
Moreover, Russia and Ukraine are notable players in maize, responsible for 4% of production combined. But their contribution is even more significant in exports, accounting for an average of 14%.
Both countries are also among the leading producers and exporters of sunflower oil. Pre-war, Ukraine’s global product exports accounted for 40%, and Russia for 18%. Thus, the war led to a surge in grains and oilseeds prices for much of 2022.
As a small, open economy, South Africa was not insulated from these agricultural and food price shocks.
Admittedly, in 2022 and 2023, South Africa was in a reasonably better place, with abundant supplies as the La Niña weather event brought good rains and supported agricultural activity. Still, the prices did not reflect the increased domestic supplies because the global shocks dominated.
These were the first round of shocks in global food prices. By the end of 2022, as the grain trade resumed in the Black Sea region following the Black Sea Grain Deal initiative that started in July 2022 and allowed for exports of grain from Ukraine without military attacks by Russia, the global agricultural prices came off the record levels seen months after the invasion of Ukraine.
The global agricultural prices continued to decline throughout 2023 and 2024. Thus, even domestically, the food price inflation moderated somewhat in 2024 (The new upside risk on prices in South Africa is the domestic drought in the 2024 summer season).
The major issue to keep in mind when observing global agricultural indices is that subjectivity can never be fully eliminated. Resource constraints can hinder objective data collection on the ground in each country, and they sometimes rely on blueprint models that may not be site-specific.
Sources of bias can stem from inconsistency in data quality, frequency and reliability from all countries. The weightings and rankings are also tricky because they must be tailored to suit different socio-economic contexts.
With that said, the key message is that South Africa is in a better place regarding food security when compared with various countries in the world.
This does not mean there should be complacency. South Africa will need to continue improving food security through expansion in agricultural production and job creation in various sectors of the economy.
At a technical level, the ideas of expanding agriculture and agro-processing capacity to boost growth and job creation were well established as far back as in the National Development Plan 2012.
They were again highlighted in the 2019 National Treasury paper, in the 2022 Agriculture and Agro-processing Master Plan and, most recently, in my book, A Country of Two Agricultures: The Disparities, The Challenges, The Solutions.
These include expanding agricultural activity in the former homelands and government land; the release of PLAS (Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy) land with title deeds (about 2.5 million hectares are in government books); effective blended finance scheme; enhancing government-commodity organisations’ partnerships in extension services; investment in the network industries (water, electricity and road infrastructure); port infrastructure and state laboratories.
Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape are the most food-insecure provinces, but they also have vast tracts of underused land.
These provinces should be a priority in agricultural development plans, with a commercial focus where conditions permit job creation to be achieved, all to boost South Africa’s food security conditions.
Wandile Sihlobo is the chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa and a senior fellow in Stellenbosch University’s Department of Agricultural Economics. His latest book is A Country of Two Agricultures.