Access to food a matter of justice, ‘not just kindness’ — Prof Thuli Madonsela

“Key among the basic freedoms essential for human good is freedom from hunger. The importance of freedom from hunger in humanhood is understood in ubuntu, which according to the Constitutional Court ... is a bedrock upon which our democracy is built.”

These were the words of Professor Thuli Madonsela, director of Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), at the Expert Symposium on Social Justice, Hunger and the Constitution hosted by the CSJ on Thursday, 10 April. She noted that the prioritisation of freedom from hunger transcended compassion, becoming a matter of constitutional governance.

Madonsela said access to food was primarily a matter of justice, “not just a matter of kindness”.

The symposium brought together researchers, academics and civil society representatives to discuss the role of the Constitution, law and rights enforcement in strengthening constitutional democracy in the face of hunger. They also considered the drivers of food insecurity and how these could be addressed.

In finding effective strategies to realise the right to food in South Africa, Madonsela suggested that people should be looking to:

• A more exhaustive use of administrative law (the branch of public law that regulates the legal relations of government officials);


• The principles enshrined in international law, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and


• The lessons to be learned from other developing countries, such as India, Colombia and Brazil.

Prof Thuli Madonsela. (Photo: Oupa Bopape / Gallo Images)

Vulnerability to hunger

Chriscy Blouws, an attorney at the Women’s Legal Centre, spoke on how women in certain professions had a compounded vulnerability to food insecurity and injustice due to a system of inequality that limited their choices and pushed them into cycles of poverty.

“If we look at the Constitution and the law itself … it provides for the right to have access to sufficient food. But my ideal is that we understand this right to food through an interrelated relationship with the right to equality, dignity, life, but also occupation and the right to choose one’s profession,” she said.

“Where women find themselves within constrained professions such as domestic work, farm work or sex work — so, professions that are either criminalised or lack oversight and protection — they have compounded vulnerability to food insecurity.”

Blouws advocated for looking at the law through an “intersectional lens”, considering factors such as race, gender and sexual orientation to better understand how certain groups could find legal structures to be an “oppressive site”.

She made the example of Mahlangu v Minister of Labour, a case dealing with the exclusion of domestic workers from compensation for workplace injury or death, stating that the initial exclusion of the profession from these legal protections was because it was made up of black women.

“One thing for me that’s … important is that there is this need for a multipronged approach, so there’s a need for the law to work together with different levels of government... But most importantly, it’s that whatever intervention is employed, it must be informed by the specific … vulnerable groups it’s meant to protect,” she said.

Other groups that are vulnerable to food insecurity are school learners and university students, as pointed out by Jonathan Jansen, a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University.

“There is, of course, a direct relationship between adequate nutrition ... and effective learning… You cannot concentrate when hungry; you are easily distracted and agitated when you have no food; you feel less valued when you see others around you who do have access to food,” he said.

Jansen questioned the value of spending “so much time telling us what the legal Constitution says” about food injustice, when “the bodily constitution continues to suffer in the same unequal land”.

Creating change

Dr Luke Metelerkamp, senior officer for urban systems at the non-governmental organisation ICLEI, emphasised that people shouldn’t underestimate how much South Africa had achieved in its work to realise the right to food, even though there was still much progress to be made.

“We’ve done a lot, there’s obviously still a long way to go, but with 9% of our national Budget, more or less, being allocated towards the right to food, why are we not seeing bigger shifts in our malnutrition rates, in our childhood hunger rates?” he said.

“The one [suggestion] is we know we’ve got challenges in delivery, and I think that’s where ... there’s a need to focus on actually testing that from a legal perspective, and ensuring that where there are services that are supposed to be provided, they are being provided.”

Another problem was the lack of an “effective centralised coordination structure” for state funding allocated to realising the right to food, he continued.

Metelerkamp suggested that one strategy for tackling food insecurity would be ensuring that more spending from social grants went into informal economies and micro-enterprises, as this would allow people a greater opportunity to participate in local economies and break out of poverty cycles.

“The informal economy has been able to compete in price with big retail in terms of how much food costs… We also know that the informal economy provides three times as many jobs for every rand spent on food. And I think that is something which we really need to be thinking very, very seriously about,” he said.

The value of intersectoral cooperation in combating hunger was raised by Professor Scott Drimie from the Southern Africa Food Lab at Stellenbosch University, who gave the example of a pilot project to address stunting in children that was recently announced by the Western Cape health and wellness minister, Mireille Wenger.

The project aims to support the nutrition of pregnant women and reduce the risk of low birthweight babies through nutrition education and the provision of a R500 monthly voucher for food aid for the prospective mothers, explained Drimie. Civil society assisted in raising money for the initiative.

“All of this in terms of bringing together care, health, economic support ... has been done as a collaboration between civil society and provincial and local government, and that, I think, has been absolutely crucial,” said Drimie.

On a legal front, Drimie noted that much could be done to protect the gains of such projects by compelling provinces to continue with successful initiatives and pushing for further action at a national level. DM