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I’VE HAD A DREAM for a long time: we take some of the unused land off Albertina Sisulu Road (what used to be Main Reef), a short distance from the string of informal and formalising settlements that run from Bram Fischerville on the back end of Soweto, across towards Leratong Hospital, and we create a produce market – a simple matter of easy-to-assemble stalls (which can be disassembled at night for safe storage in a large lock-up).
Then we invite the smallholders of the West Rand and Gauteng and even nearby North West (I know of many growing vegetables and fruit, in a great arc sweeping from Randfontein east via Tarlton), to bring their produce here, say, three days of the week. Cut out the middleman, keep prices low while ensuring the smallholder gets a decent cut, one that enables her to make a living off farming.
Living in those townships are thousands of people who are reliant mainly on social grants and piece work when they can get it – social grants represent a powerful financial bloc, billions of rands annually, an opportunity for those with a basic necessity like food to sell, but one which will only be win-win if the producer can deal with the purchaser face to face, instead of via the big retailers.
Dr Tracy Ledger brought this dream roaring out of the mental cave where it’s been hiding for years, with her fascinating and powerful book, An Empty Plate (Jacana 2016).
In it, she points out that South Africans are hungry – as many as 80% of our households are underspending significantly on food, translating into serious deficits in nutrition. (Which explains my Horrific Fact of the Year, that more than one in four of South African children suffers from stunting, a poor physical and mental start which affects them – and our whole society – lifelong.)
And yet the price paid for food like veggies, dairy and meat at the farm gate has been under serious pressure for years (dairy is a notorious example: “Between 1998 and 2014 more than 5 000 dairy farmers went out of business…”, most of them small farmers, because of the untenable prices and conditions – resulting in as many as 50 000 lost jobs).
The food system between the farmer and the consumer sucks cash from the consumer’s purse.
“It is not hard to work out that if the margin between the producer and consumer prices of food were reduced, food would become a lot more affordable for a lot of people,” Ledger writes. “This is the real tragedy of our food problem – we already produce enough food in South Africa to feed everyone and farmers are selling it at a price [at] which most people could afford to eat it.”
Ledger talks solutions in the latter part of the book: a solidarity economy, she says, would leave the existing food system of big retailers in place but sidestep it in important ways.
These chapters reminded me of an interview I did years back with Frances Moore Lappé (famous for writing Diet for a Small Planet in the 1970s), about her book, Hope’s Edge. One of the places she visited for this book was Brazil’s sixth largest city, Belo Horizonte, which is now renowned for making food a right (a right which, Ledger points out, is enshrined in South Africa’s Constitution).
In 1993, “The newly elected mayor of Belo Horizonte, Patrus Ananias, acknowledged his 2.5 million citizens’ right to food […] He created a Secretariat for Food Policy and Supply that included a 20 member council of citizens, workers and business leaders […] to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.
The explicit mandate was to increase access to healthy food for all as a measure of social justice.”
Among many other initiatives, Belo Horizonte’s pioneering programme eventually saw food markets set up around the city at choice, easily accessible spots. Local farmers vie for places at these markets.
A couple of dozen selected products have set prices, sometimes as much as 50% below the normal retail price. (Other produce can be sold at market prices, and farmers still get a decent living out of what they make on both categories.) “In 2008 the city operated 49 conventional and 7 organic markets, benefiting 97 small producers from surrounding areas.”
The result? Flourishing small farmers – and a reduction in infant malnutrition and infant deaths of 50%, among other things. At a total cost of less than 2% of the city budget.
“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it,” Ariana Aranha, then Special Assistant to Belo Horizonte’s Food Security Programme, said to Lappé.
Key factors are: Transparent public communication and education on goals and strategies; organised citizen participation and multiple public-private partnerships; tasks bundled under one distinct agency with its own budget; continuous evaluation and adaptation; addressing the entire chain of production and consumption; securing the right to food through legislation resilient to changes in government.
This is what can be done when you stop thinking of food as a commodity and start thinking of it as a human right. Doesn’t it set your brain abuzz and your heart on fire?
Could we follow suit and end hunger in our own cities? That’s all I want for Christmas, every Christmas. Every New Year. And all the days in between.
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