From the Cape Times (Link) this morning. More evidence as to why a food security policy needs to be decoupled from the current production bias. Food insecurity needs to be understood as multi-dimensional and a systemic challenge:

“One Weet-Bix, three teabags and half a cup of rice.

On most days, that’s all that Tafelsig resident Mastoera Collop can afford.

Last week, Collop displayed small R1 plastic packets of salt, rice, coffee and half a bar of soap to show a panel from the National Energy Regulating Authority of SA (Nersa) why the poor could not afford another electricity tariff increase.

On average, she can afford to buy only R15 worth of groceries for the day from the “Rand-a-rama” shops run by a number of Tafelsig residents.

Collop, 48, was speaking at the Cape Town public hearings of Eskom’s application for a 16 percent electricity tariff increase each year until 2018.

This would more than double the price of electricity over the five years.

Eskom says the increase is necessary to finance its operations and new capacity.

“I want to show you what people live with each day,” Collop said.

“One Weet-Bix. If people can’t even afford to buy a box of Weet-Bix or food for the week, how can they afford an electricity increase? If petrol and food increases hit us this hard, then what will electricity do?”

Collop buys R5 worth of electricity a day when she can.

“Many nights we go without electricity because you must decide between that and food, and you can’t eat electricity,” she said.

A R5 supply of electricity gives her 3.5 units, which she says is enough to boil one kettle of water and cook a quick pot of food.

“With all the challenges of unemployment and crime, we still have to worry about electricity. When do I have some warmth in my life? It’s like the rich get richer and the poor must die,” Collop said.

She lost her job at a clothing factory five years ago and has been unable to find another job. Her husband, who was retrenched in 2010, does odd jobs and comes home with between R50 and R60 at a time. There are four children.

Nersa panellists were lost for words after the presentations by Collop and others who described the poverty on the Cape Flats and in the townships.

Panellists acknowledged poverty levels were severe but said Collop’s presentation made that reality clearer.

One panellist later told Collop: “I am so, so sorry. I don’t know if we can help you, but we will try.”

On Friday, residents from Manenberg, Gugulethu and other areas made presentations to Nersa about why they could not afford the present tariffs, let alone an increase of 16 percent.

Manenberg resident and Right2Know activist Rugshana Pascoe told the panel: “We live from hand to mouth.

“I started cooking on a fire and it was degrading for my children.

“What are Eskom chief executive officers earning? It’s painful to know that the poor pay for the rich, and is this gap going to grow? Before 1994, when we decided to take a stand, we did not think we would stand here now and beg for mercy for the poor.”

Lerona Carstens, from the Tafelsig Residents’ Association, pleaded with Nersa not to allow the tariff increase, saying most of the poor were unemployed and struggled to live on government grants.”

Just for the record, the 12 million figure is not an AFSUN figure, but I am delighted that our work has re-invigorated a national conversation on food. 

“NEHAWU is disturbed but not shocked by the report that shows that 12 million South Africans are “food insecure”

30 January 2013

NEHAWU is disturbed but not shocked by the results of a five year study ,by the University of Cape Town’s African Food Security Unit Network, that shows that 12 million South Africans go to bed hungry every day.

Since the 2007-08 global economic crises; this country has been struggling with rising food prices and more people have become susceptible to hunger. According to the 2010 UNDP report, 44% of workers in South Africa live on less than R10 a day meaning that they can barely afford a single loaf of bread a day.

This situation has been aggravated by a steep and relentless rise in the cost of water, fuel and electricity.

The proposed Eskom’s 16% annual tariff adjustment over the next 5 years will worsen the situation.

This state of affairs, if not averted, can only result in instability and potential unrest in the country.

What is obvious is that the time for the immoral excess that we saw in the mining and agricultural sectors; where managers and bosses have been feeding while the workers go hungry is unsustainable.

Government’s failure to address the question of rural development and land reform is at the centre of this mounting problem.

The report shows that it is not only rural people that are affected but also city dwellers face starvation and malnutrition. This can be attributed to the fact that most rural people are forced to move to the cities because of poverty.

The scarcity of jobs puts a huge strain on the available resources and also results in government’s misallocation of capital because of rapid geographical relocations and an uneven population growth.

South Africa with a population of 50 million is reliant on about 8000 commercial farmers and small scale farmers that produce 80% of our maize for their food security. These farmers also prefer to export their produce, therefore forcing South Africans to pay inflated prices or to import basic food supplies.

The report shows that 77% of households surveyed were either moderately or severely food insecure.

This puts into focus the debate around labour brokers, minimum wage and a new remuneration policy for public servants. This report makes a mockery of the widely held myth that is perpetuated by the national treasury that public servants are overpaid.

These very same public servants take care of more than {5} five members of their extended family with their meagre salaries.

NEHAWU is calling for the implementation of the basic income grant that will accommodate the millions of unemployed young people who are left to starve because of unemployment.

Our government needs to adopt a sense of urgency in putting into motion the policies and programmes that will help the nation achieve the proposed second phase of our transition.

It is obvious that unless there is decisive action from government; we are unlikely to reverse the looming crisis.

The protests that we have already seen in response to poor service delivery are likely to escalate if we do not arrest this situation as a nation.

We are likely to experience food protests unless we act decisively to address the triple crisis of poverty, unemployment and inequality.

Issued by NEHAWU Secretariat Office

For further information, please contact: Sizwe Pamla (NEHAWU Media Liaison Officer) at 011 833 2902 - 082 558 5962 or email:sizwep@nehawu.org.za

Visit NEHAWU website: www.nehawu.org.za

_______________________________

Norman Mampane (Communications Officer)

Congress of South African Trade Unions

110 Jorissen Cnr Simmonds Street

Braamfontein

2017

P.O.Box 1019

Johannesburg

2000

South Africa

Tel: +27 11 339-4911 or Direct 010 219-1342

Mobile: +27 72 416 3790

E-Mail: mam…@cosatu.org.za

“

The Cape Times are running two articles featuring our AFSUN work today. 

It is interesting how stories cluster - also in the paper today are two stories about the failure of apartheid and post-apartheid spatial planning and the impact on poverty, inequality and social unrest. Both speak well to our work.

Mail and Guardian Audio Slide Show on the Philippi Horticultural Area and Food Insecurity

http://mg.co.za/multimedia/2012-11-14-food-insecurity-in-cape-town-1

If only I knew how to embed this properly. The link if for Heidi Swart’s audio slide show about the PHA and food insecurity in Cape Town. The article will be in tomorrow’s Mail and Guardian

“The United Nations food agency says hunger is worsening in Zimbabwe after erratic rains, shortages of seeds and fertilizer and “poor agricultural practices” in the troubled economy led to a reduction in fields planted with the main staple foods.

The World Food Programme said cereal harvests in the current season were down by an estimated one third compared to last year.

About 1.1 million rural people will need food aid up to December, rising to 1.6 million in the traditionally “lean months” to March, it said.

The agency’s latest bulletin on Tuesday said $119m is needed for upcoming food assistance but so far only $32m has been pledged by financial institutions and donors for food imports. 

WFP said food shortfalls are becoming especially critical in arid southern Zimbabwe.” (link)

Note: No comment on urban food insecurity as a result….

For a report on food insecurity in Harare see the AFSUN publication site. Follow the links from www.afsun.org

From the Guardian, by Richard Seymour (Link)

“Lambeth council is turning to food banks in order to manage the crisis of soaring poverty in the borough. This is never a good sign. When soup kitchens started to appear in large numbers in the US during the 1980s, it was supposed to be a form of crisis management. Now they have become a threadbare safety net for masses of jobless and working poor Americans as the welfare system fails them. Dependence on charitable food provision has soared during the recession. Evidence suggests that they don’t begin to meet the nutritional needs of those who use them.

The trend is for what is supposed to be a temporary stopgap to become a permanent part of the welfare system. It turns welfare into an entrepreneurial wild west, dependent on often inexperienced providers, institutionalising and stabilising chronic insecurity and undernourishment for millions. Whereas in the postwar era poverty was residual or the product of the economic cycle, it has acquired a structural permanence. Nor can this be assumed to be an accidental outcome. States that cut welfare systems are knowing actors, well-placed to evaluate the predictable effects of their actions.

In the 1980s, when neoliberal policies were being rolled out, the sociologist Göran Therborn wrote of “the Brazilianisation of advanced capitalism”. He pointed out that even in the crisis-ridden 1970s and early 1980s, mass unemployment was not inevitable provided there were institutional commitments to promote full employment. The rise of joblessness was not a force of nature but a strategic choice.

Paired with a shift from welfare to the punitive management of poverty, the result would be, as in Brazil, a trichotomous division of society. At the top would be the obscenely rich, capitalists and top business managers. In the middle would be stably employed workers, middle-class professionals and so on. And at the bottom would be the poorest sectors of the working class, permanently unemployed or underemployed, insecure and subject to increasing moral regulation by the state.

The spread of precarity was thus an intended effect of the reforms, and this is the real social basis for ideological memes such as “the underclass” or “the precariat”. The ideological code for the effect sought is “the discipline of the market” (a phrase that reminds one of Francis Begbie’s minatory growls about “the discipline ay the basebaw bat”). The politico-caloric calculation is that imposed food insecurity is a motive force in improving productivity. Take away their benefits, and they have to work. The idea that the threat of starvation is the only real guarantee of capitalist dynamism, and that welfare causes stagnation, is an old one in conservative thought, going back to Edmund Burke. But it was only in the late 20th century that this elite political philosophy was converted into a popular moral idiom, a reactionary common sense.

The ideology of the “big society” is naturally implicated here. A key ideological source for this doctrine is Marvin Olasky, whose concept of “compassionate conservatism” has guided both Republicans and Tories. Olasky’s premise is that the state provision of welfare should be replaced by funding of charitable services run by churches and other voluntary groups. In that way, he suggests, those who most needed help would receive not only sustenance but the chance of a transformative encounter with another human being.

The result under the Bush administration was that the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives channelled billions of dollars to church-based services dealing with homeless people and drug addicts. Instead of welfare being a means to cope with market failure, supporting workers when employers do not, it became a means of moral regulation. The idea was that to be unemployed, addicted, homeless or hungry was to have merely a personal misfortune, reflecting personal failure. The recipient of such welfare is thus not just dependent, but at a moral deficit. The flipside of this paternalistic humanitarianism was the fear and loathing for the poor, which in the UK has been expressed in the spiteful locution “chav”.

However, it would be mistaken to suppose that such precarity is restricted to the bottom rung of society. The effects of precarity run right up the chain of social classes and strata. While the urban poor are the most directly blighted, poverty and malnourishment act as a whip to discipline the whole workforce. The threat is not just of perpetual insecurity and hunger, but also of losing the status of respectability conferred by employment, and thus “self-reliance”. And as Shanene Thorpe discovered, as welfare is shredded, the boundaries of respectability are shifting upwards, including more people in the ranks of the culpable “underclass”. Those fortunate enough to stay just the right side of this divide will have added motivation to be compliant; docile toward social superiors, viciously competitive towards everyone else. Now we are all precarious.”

This from Jay Naidoo’s latest article in the Daily Maverick:

“Food security has always focused on the issue of price volatility. We have to go beyond the challenges of increasing food production to meet future demand, and much rather address the nutritional quality of the food that the poor consume. We need to ensure that the developing world can deliver life-sustaining nutrients for the millions of pregnant, lactating women, infants and young children who have greater nutritional requirements than the general population. 

Malnutrition leads to impaired cognitive development in children, which weakens their development path and leads to irreversible changes. Its impact includes growth faltering (stunting or low height for age) and lower learning abilities. Malnourished young children are also more at risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease in adulthood. Moreover, these overall effects cause a decline in human capital which we cannot afford during economic crises.

While GAIN’s approach may seem intuitive, at the time there was little political will to change the business model to address malnutrition.  Ever-tight financial and human resources were targeted toward recuperating children on death’s door. The nutrition community was fractured and had little data to back its cause to change the paradigm; preventing the problem seemed overwhelming. Moreover, the health community held a myopic view that this was a problem to be solved by medical means.

It also did not take into account that the majority of the poor, even those at the base of the pyramid, accessed at least some portion of their food through markets, or that preventing chronic malnutrition would be both less expensive and more cost-effective than treating it, since it is the market and private entrepreneurs from village to global level that primarily produce food. There was also no acknowledgement that with increasing migration, the bulk of our global population in city slums would begin depending on industrially produced foods, making household food security a great risk. 

From the Daily Maverick (Link)

On how we measure hunger

This is a great blog post unpacking the politics and practice of those big, scary numbers you hear about regarding hunger. Here’s the first two paragraphs (Well worth a read):

Global hunger numbers must be among the most widely quoted and over-interpreted of all the indicators at development wonks’ and campaigners’ disposal. ‘One billion people (one in seven of the world’s population) go to bed hungry’ is a compelling headline and is used variously to argue for more effective social protection mechanisms, increased investment in smallholder agriculture, and effective measures to curb food price volatility. All are urgent causes, and all are worthy of a punchy ‘killer fact’ or two.

In fact, so powerful is the draw of a current big-scary-number that until recently the World Bank’s website displayed a ticking ‘hunger clock’, which extrapolated the (then) latest hunger estimate from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and portrayed a situation getting graver by the second. In April the same clock was displayed several metres above the heads of Washington pedestrians in the lead-up to the Bank’s Spring Meetings. But for all the power of a big number, and all the urgency of the underlying situation, is this metric anything more than smoke and mirrors?