South Africa’s food system is broken and urgent government intervention is needed

As increases in public transport costs and electricity prices, coupled with alarmingly higher food prices take their toll on households and the plates of families, it is clear that food prices must fall. We need to reject that in a country that can feed everyone, but doesn’t, millions go hungry. Affordability plays a major part in this hunger as it creates barriers to accessing nutritious foods for the majority of people in the country.

The food industry, which includes the major supermarkets and big businesses that process and package foods, plays a key role in sustaining hunger by influencing food availability and pricing. This is described by Dr Tracy Ledger, author of An Empty Plate: Why we are losing the battle for our food system, why it matters, and how we can win it back, as vested interests determining “the income of farm workers, the price, the quality, and the source of food on your shelves”.

One example of how this works is the huge difference between what supermarkets charge consumers and how much they pay producers, especially for products that don’t need to be processed, like fruit, vegetables, eggs and whole chickens.

This has made many foods, particularly nutritious food, too expensive for the many people living in poverty in the country. In 2021, the supermarket price of a dozen eggs was about R35, but if purchased directly from the farmer it would cost around R17 per dozen, according to the findings of the South African Poultry Association’s Subsistence and Small Commercial Farmer Report. The Competition Commission has also expressed concern over the wide farm-to-retail spread in prices. 

Price gouging, excessive and unfair price increases that are not justified by a rise in the cost of providing the goods, and the price-fixing of essential items such as bread are a few more examples. As the country prepared to go under lockdown in March 2020, businesses used it as an opportunity to cash in on the crisis by hiking the prices of essential goods — including food.