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# W(h)ither food democracy in South Africa?
- URL: https://brain-food.ghost.io/whither-food-democracy-in-south-africa-2/
- Published: 2023-06-06T16:29:39.000Z
- Updated: 2023-06-06T16:29:39.000Z
- Author: Adèle Sulcas
- Tags: #Migrated-1793712467887, #sqs, #Import 2026-11-03 13:27

#### A five-year plan to combat malnutrition, housed in the Office of the Presidency, lies fallow.

June 6, 2023 - In its five years of existence, the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan has not made even a tiny difference to South Africa’s massive malnutrition problem. The malnutrition problem is multifactorial – what policy experts call a “triple burden” of malnutrition, consisting of undernutrition (not enough food, basically), obesity, and micronutrient deficiencies (which can co-exist with obesity). The inaction problem is multisectoral across the South African government - in fact, it seems to be a strategy unto itself: Do as little as possible, preferably nothing, but keep saying you have good intentions and everything will be fine.

But everything is not fine, as the millions of hungry, obese-but-undernourished, diabetes-afflicted South Africans will tell you. Seven million South Africans experience chronic hunger, and half of all adults in South Africa are overweight (23%) or obese (27%) ­- overall, 31% of men and 68% of women. (Obesity and nutrient deficiencies can - and often do - co-exist.) This is [costing the South African health system at least ZAR33-billion](https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/opinion/2022/2022-09/obesity-costs-south-africa-billions-we-did-the-sums.html?ref=brain-food.ghost.io) per year, researchers from Wits University have calculated.

The South African government published, five years ago, the [2018-2023 South African Food and Nutrition Security Plan](https://www.nutritionsociety.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/National-Food-and-Nutrition-Security-Plan-2018-2023.pdf?ref=brain-food.ghost.io). In 2021 it created, nominally at least, the [National Food and Nutrition Security Council](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-07-04-hunger-and-malnutrition-escalate-but-state-food-plan-is-years-behind/?utm%5Fterm=Autofeed&utm%5Fmedium=Social&utm%5Fsource=LinkedIn) \- a kind of advisory committee - to put said Plan into practice. The Plan’s stated aim was to “combat the silent crisis of malnutrition and reverse its growth in the next 15 years”. Five years later, at the end of its first five-year term, the Plan not only has no demonstrable successes to point to – the “triple burden” of malnutrition is worse than ever – but has not even convened its first Council meeting, which was the Plan’s first strategic objective.

“It seems to have fallen off the policy agenda,” said Dr Jane Battersby in 2022, in [a paper initially published in New Agenda](https://ifaaza.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Revised-food-security-policy.pdf?ref=brain-food.ghost.io) on reshaping the South African food system. Battersby, a of UCT’s environment and geography department and considered a venerable doyenne of food-policy work in South Africa, saying that the advisory committee had yet to be formed.

Prof Scott Drimie of Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Sustainability Transitions corroborated this. “We do not have much progress since April 2021,” Drimie said. At that time, Drimie told me, the Acting Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, led a team of DPME officials and other government departments to deliver a presentation to the Cabinet Committee on Social Protection, Community and Human Development (SPCHD) on progress with the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan 2018-2023\. “Both the President and Deputy President were present at this meeting,” Drimie said.

So much for the Constitutional right of all citizens to have access to sufficient nutritious, safe and affordable food. And so much for the Plan’s ostensibly stratospheric level of importance - housed in the Office of the Presidency, under the (ahem) stewardship of the Deputy President.

When I started writing about the Plan and the Council, in July 2022, I was really optimistic about it - unreasonably so, before President Cyril Ramaphosa’s fence-sitting, internal ANC-faction-appeasing inaction (and possible corruption) become inescapably clear - and before I realized that four years in (at that point) the Plan had not even managed to achieve its first “strategic objective”, which was for the Council to meet. In fact, the Council has not even been constituted, ie. representatives, supposedly to come from all sectors, have not been nominated or selected. My optimism totally vanished when I discovered that the Plan’s budget of ZAR86.8-billion per year was (still in 2022) not funded.

So much for DPME “senior sector specialist for health” Thulani Masilela telling me in June 2022, when I was reporting the story for the Daily Maverick: “There must be an ethos of serving children, because children are going hungry every day, and I can tell you at the committee they get this, and they understand this.”

In case anyone actually believed this, you need only look at the shocking [failure of KZN’s school meal program in April](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2023-04-17-kzn-schools-forced-to-send-pupils-home-early-after-national-school-nutrition-programme-fails-to-deliver/?ref=brain-food.ghost.io) – due to a “tender failure” – leaving thousands of children without school lunch (and for many their only meal of the day) for further corroboration that no-one in government appears to “get this”.

*My original article for the* Daily Maverick *on the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan* [*can be found here*](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-07-04-hunger-and-malnutrition-escalate-but-state-food-plan-is-years-behind/?utm%5Fterm=Autofeed&utm%5Fmedium=Social&utm%5Fsource=LinkedIn)*.*