Lethal virus versus lethal hunger

The entire food supply chain appears to be threatened at every level during the lockdown period, which is currently set to last for three weeks, from 27 March to 17 April.

 Professor Lise Korsten, co-director of the Centre of Excellence in Food Security, said in an interview earlier this week that the food sector may be operating with a reduced workforce: 

“This may affect mass scale food production, processing or distribution. And this could have ripple effects on the affordability of food.”

Nowhere will any of the effects of a disrupted food sector be felt more keenly than in areas where spaza shops and informal traders are linchpins in the supply chain.

Violent conflict, looting, xenophobic attacks, domestic violence and the possibility of the police, army and other security services becoming repressive and heavy-handed, have already become a part of South Africa’s lockdown narrative. Most of this conflict has stemmed from food insecurity.

However, amendments to the lockdown regulations released on Thursday, 2 April 2020 go some way to relieving these problems. The amendments now explicitly state that spaza shops and informal traders can, with written permission from a municipal authority, operate their business.

Although only a few words were added to the original regulations, the clarity is widely being met with relief.

“I would not call this a little change,” said Marc Wegerif of the University of Pretoria’s Development Studies department, which studies food and land and agrarian systems. “It’s a significant change because of the sheer numbers of people affected by it.”

According to the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) street traders account for 500,000 livelihoods nationally and for 40% of township economies. Surveys suggest that up to 70% of households source food from informal outlets.

Wegerif said the scale of this market was hugely underestimated. The Johannesburg Fresh Produce Market, for instance, has a turnover of between R7-billion and R8-billion per year. The market is run through 14 agents who are the interface between the farmer and the customer. Informal traders make up about half of these agents’ customers, which means they account for up to R4-billion of the market’s turnover per year.

“People just don’t understand the size of this market,” he said. “The other thing people often fail to take account of is that the street traders consistently sell their produce at lower prices than supermarkets, usually up to 50% less... So, for consumers, street traders are significant in two ways: it’s about accessibility and about price.”

PLAAS, in an article, outlines the many frightening ways in which the lockdown affects people’s access to food, and says that surveys from the past week show that people were excluding meat, vegetables and fruit from their shopping. They were buying staples and non-perishables, because they could generally only get to one shop. This meant the food people were consuming was reduced in nutrition and diversity.

The South African Civil Society for Women’s, Adolescents’ and Children’s health issued a call to action the day after the amendment, saying not enough food in the home had been shown to have a negative influence on family dynamics and not having enough food as a community had been documented to cause instability resulting in riots, protesting and violence.

The question of how these amended regulations are going to filter down to the streets is now open, as municipalities have to supply the permits the regulations require, and the systems for acquiring permits under the current state of national disaster are not necessarily clear either to the municipalities or to the people who need them.

Legal expert Jaap de Visser, director of the Dullah Omar Institute at the University of the Western Cape, said about the amended regulations that they have “legally clarified” the situation.

“But nuance gets lost from policy to law enforcement,” De Visser said.

Inconsistent interpretation of the original regulations by the security forces caused many of the flare-ups seen in the past week.

Wegerif said that the amendment to the regulations were welcome, but it was now up to municipalities and the police to ensure “the changes are taken as an opportunity for municipalities to coordinate with informal traders to provide their services in a safe way”.

Korsten pointed out that it was still uncertain how long Covid-19 lasts on surfaces.

“According to the World Health Organisation, studies suggest that coronaviruses (including preliminary information on the Covid-19 virus) may persist on surfaces for a few hours or up to several days. A concern that may arise related to food is: can the virus survive on food and for how long?”

Wegerif added that another worry was security: “We are also concerned about informal traders’ and spaza shop owners security, as there have been attacks on them. This is an opportunity for collaboration, and we hope that it will be used as such.”

De Visser pointed out other concerns. For instance, there are lots of rules in terms of which spaza shops can request financial support. These require a fair amount of formalisation on the part of traders. These rules could be misunderstood as being required for getting the permits from municipalities to trade. Also, he said, there was a separate set of regulations aimed at municipalities that currently might cause confusion about whether informal traders could continue operating, and these needed to be clarified for municipal workers as well.

“So there is still a lot of static in the system,” he said.

“The government has been under extreme pressure to act quickly and decisively and they have done well under the circumstances. Mistakes were bound to be made, but they deserve credit for taking swift action to correct those mistakes.” DM/MC