Cape Town - A new Statistics SA survey has found that about 2.1 million or 11.6% of South African households reported experiencing hunger.
The survey said two-thirds of these households were in urban areas, and almost half a million of them were found in the country’s largest cities – Cape Town (240 970) and Johannesburg (238 610).
“These two metros are among the fastest growing cities in South Africa, according to projections by the UN and other organisations, partly because they receive large volumes of people seeking employment and better living conditions.”
The survey, titled Assessing Food Inadequacy and Hunger in South Africa, used data obtained from the 2021 General Household Survey (GHS) and estimated the country had 17.9 million households in that year.
More than half of the households that reported experiencing hunger are male-headed and more than 90% are headed by an African/black.
A quarter of households that reported experiencing hunger in the whole country are in Gauteng and almost half of them are in the City of Johannesburg.
KwaZulu-Natal, with 17.5%, has the second highest percentage of those households, followed by the Western Cape with 14%.
The data showed 683221 households with children aged five years or younger reported experiencing hunger in 2021.
Of those households with children aged five or younger, 20.1% were in KwaZulu-Natal’s non-metro areas, followed by 13.6% in Johannesburg and 12.4% in Cape Town.
The survey said there had been expectations that food security would recover from the effects of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. However, data shows world hunger increased further in 2021, adding a total of 150 million people since 2019.
In February this year, the Solidarity Fund, which was created in response to Covid-19, and which distributed food parcels in partnership with 43 organisations around the country monthly during the pandemic, ended its feeding campaign.
In that month alone, the Fund distributed 9696 food parcels to 39 areas in six provinces, delivering more than 1.8 million meals and feeding 58176 people for more than one-and-a-half months, working with, among other groups, SA Harvest, the national food rescue and hunger relief organisation.
SA Harvest itself has delivered the equivalent of 38.6 million meals in the past three years by rescuing 11.7 million kilograms of food that would have gone to waste.
In an appeal on Human Rights Day last month, non-profit SA Harvest’s founder and chief executive Alan Browde said that 20 million people in South Africa were severely food vulnerable, but yet, at the same time 10 million tons of food went to waste.
Browde said: “From food waste alone, we could make massive strides to ending hunger.
“Add to this some basic interventions like greater freedom for the millions of informal traders countrywide; improving the manner in which grants are disbursed and ensuring they actually get to the recipients; altering the VAT policy on basic foodstuffs and much more.”
