Hunger strikes the heart of South Africa

Pleas for food assistance to aid groups from the malnourished are intensifying in cities and rural areas

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Starvation is stealthily stalking South Africa, sweeping through cities and rural villages where some people are dying of malnutrition or resorting to familicide to stave off the pangs of hunger once and for all.

This is the grim picture painted by Corene Conradie, the Eastern Cape coordinator of disaster aid group Gift of the Givers, who has first-hand experience of working with the many child and grandmother headed households across the province, and other poverty alleviation organisations. 

Conradie spoke to the Mail & Guardian this week as the world marked World Food Day in commemoration of the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation on 16 October 1945.

She said people in the Eastern Cape were starving to death or — she claimed —  opting in some instances to take their own and their children’s lives to end perpetual hunger due to a lack of access to sufficient, nutritious food.

According to a Statistics South Africa report on food inadequacy and hunger in the country, out of the nearly 17.9 million households in 2021, almost 80% (14.2 million) reported that they had adequate access to food, while 15% (2.6 million) and 6% (1.1 million) respectively said they had “inadequate” and “severe[ly] inadequate” access to food.

Two-thirds of these households were located in urban areas, and almost half a million were in the largest cities — Cape Town (240 970) and Johannesburg (238 610). 

In addition, more than half a million households with children aged five-years or younger reported experiencing hunger, mostly in KwaZulu-Natal’s non-metro areas (20.1%), Johannesburg (13.6%) and Cape Town (12.4%).

Conradie, who has worked in the Eastern Cape since pre-Covid-19 times, starting with a Karoo drought alleviation project, said the non-governmental organisation had planned to help people with food parcels during the pandemic but had been forced to extend its programmes as job losses and poverty intensified.

“It started during Covid-19 when increasing calls for food came and we established 50 feeding schemes because of job losses and breadwinners who died during the pandemic. We felt the hunger got even worse and it has not stopped since the pandemic, it has just got worse. We have rolled out programmes in the rural areas where food insecurity is critical and very high,” she said.

“Mothers are killing their children and taking their own lives because they cannot feed them. This is not something new that has been happening …. We are working with the South African Police Service where in many cases no foul play is suspected. They can’t put on the docket that it is due to hunger, but there are several cases where they call us and this is the suspicion in the village.”

“And when we go into the village, into several houses we can see the need, the lack of food these people experience because there is no economic growth.”

Eastern Cape spokesperson warrant officer Majola Nkohli confirmed that the police had 

 conducted several projects in partnership with the Gift of the Givers “where destitute and impoverished communities received gifts such as wheelchairs, groceries, and blankets”.

“However, SAPS could not confirm any death that was caused by a dire need for food,  even though poverty is very common in other parts of the Eastern Cape,” Nkohli told the M&G.

The spokesperson for the province’s department of social development, Mzusi Solani, declined to comment on the allegations of suicide.

However, he directed the M&G to a issued statement by social development MEC Bukiwe Fanta which said the department had assisted 46 000 beneficiaries via recent social relief of distress programmes, while more than 24 000 women participated in empowerment programmes and 16 000 people accessed nutritious meals through its community nutrition and development programmes.

As many as 35.5 million people in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries lost their jobs in 2020 due to the pandemic, according to a 2022 report from charitable confederation Oxfam.

It estimated that 58 million people in SADC, including South Africa, are now facing food insecurity, while almost 18.6 million children are stunted.

Conradie said Gift of the Givers had reported the hunger crisis to the department of social development, which had simply advised that people should register for the R350 social relief of distress grant.

“There is no food and the problem is many people are in deep rural areas, they are so cut off, many are child headed houses with undocumented children, and women headed households where the men have gone to look for work, and those with gogos sitting there with children who do not even know where the parents are,” she said.

“This should be treated as an emergency, as a disaster because people are dying without food.”

Conradie cited a case where six children in the Butterworth area died in 2022 “due to the effects of malnutrition”. 

“NGOs, businesses and the government need to intervene to help these people. These people are so very peaceful, they say they are just so used to suffering and not being heard and sitting in poverty. They survive daily by borrowing from one another and depending on the community for assistance,” she said.

In urban areas orphanages are filling up “quite quickly” as  mothers opt to drop off their children “because they simply can’t care for them anymore”, Conradie said.

“More people in urban areas are flocking to soup kitchens and in rural areas where there is a community garden people walk for long distances just to get one small cabbage.”

South African Red Cross national programmes manager Ireen Mutombwa-Shumba said desktop reviews showed that about 20% of the population was food insecure by April 2023. 

“The latest drought status report shared by the National Disaster Management Centre at the end of September 2023 highlights persistent drought in parts of Northern Cape (Namakwa), Western Cape (Central Karoo) and Eastern Cape (Mthatha),” Mutombwa-Shumba said.

“These areas are showing no improvement on the standardised precipitation index and such conditions expose most of the people in those communities to be food insecure due to very hot conditions which are not favourable for subsistence food production.

“Most of the communities in these drought stricken areas have limited water access which makes it difficult for them to spare some of it to irrigate their crops as they rarely receive even below average rainfall.”

Among factors driving food insecurity, she added, are weak economic growth, exacerbated by Covid-19, high unemployment, poverty, low income, and world economic shocks.

“In South Africa, approximately 19 million people survive on social grants and this reflects how such a large population is vulnerable to food insecurity as the grant might not be enough for them to have food provision for the whole month.”

In KwaZulu-Natal, Cindy Norcott, founder of the volunteer driven Robin Hood Foundation — which has disseminated hundreds of thousands of ‘gogo bags’ of food and stationery to rural grandmother headed households across the province, and started the “sarmie armie” that distributes sandwiches to schools and feeding schemes — said it was “a logistical nightmare” to assist people during the pandemic.

“(During) Covid-19 we were helping old age homes, nursing homes and orphanages, and again in the (April 2022) flooding we were helping people in the community halls. We get daily requests from organisations and individuals saying they need food, anything to eat. I had a call from an orphanage yesterday saying we are desperate for food, our funding has just dried up. The cost of living is crazy,” Norcott said.

The organisation assists a feeding scheme on Thursday night where homeless people and addicts would come for food.

“But now we are seeing the working poor arrive, guys and women in their blue collar overalls coming after work and standing in line waiting to get a meal which is breyani, a sandwich, an apple, chips whatever we can give them. We are getting loads of calls from people. It is quite devastating to see,” Norcott said.

Jane Battersby, a University of Cape Town urban geographer, noted that the Constitution states that “everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water.” 

She said while the government was arguably doing something to fulfil the right by providing grants and programmes, much of it was “tokenism” and not really protecting rights, adding that she was surprised people were not taking to the streets in protest.

“It is a right that has not been tested in South Africa,” she said.

“With Covid-19 and some of the other crises some of our urban governments have become aware of the challenge that this is something happening in cities but they have limited mandates and money to do something about it. There is an increasing awareness of the problem but not really the power to act and it will not be helped by the government plan to cut spending,” she said.

“There is generally an unwillingness to deal with the systemic determinants of food insecurity, and no sense to engage the private sector or to address food insecure populations and they are not looking at regulating food prices.”

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