We Welcome the Inquiry into the Crisis of Hunger

13 March 2026
Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Statement

We Welcome the Inquiry into the Crisis of Hunger

Abahlali baseMjondolo welcomes the inquiry into the food system by the South African Human Rights Commission. It is a long overdue inquiry as many people in the country often go to sleep on an empty stomach, and many more cannot afford healthy food. We all know people who boil weeds to at least be able to give their children something to eat. Not being able to feed your children is extremely painful.

We face a severe and growing food crisis. Around 25–26% of the population — roughly 15 million people — are food insecure, meaning they do not have reliable access to enough food and experience hunger. Around 11% of people experience severe food insecurity. Approximately 30 young children die every day — around 11,000 each year — due directly or indirectly to hunger and malnutrition. About 29% of children under five are stunted as a result of chronic malnutrition.

The country produces more than enough food to ensure that all its people have access to sufficient nutritious food. The crisis of hunger is therefore a crisis of distribution and not production. In structural terms it is a result of massive unemployment, low-wage precarious labour, the concentration of land ownership and the capture of the food system by the supermarkets. A small number of large corporations exercise enormous power over what food is produced, how it is distributed and what it costs. Food is treated primarily as a commodity for profit rather than as a human right.

In ethical terms the crisis is also a result of the fact that poor people are not counted as fully human. We are treated as disposable. Our suffering is not taken as a crisis. Our children can starve to death.

Things must change. Food cannot continue to be treated as a commodity to enrich a few while millions go hungry. While all measures to ensure that people do not go hungry and have access to healthy food must be welcomed, we must aim to resolve the crisis by supporting moves towards food sovereignty rather than charity.

We cannot separate the poverty and high unemployment that exist in our country from hunger. We cannot separate the inequalities that exist in our country from the millions of people who go to sleep hungry. We cannot separate hunger from the dispossession of land and the injustices of colonialism and apartheid. The same history that made the rich to be rich has made the poor to be poor. It is the weight of this history that results in the primary weight of hunger falling on impoverished black people. The ANC has failed to address the history, and the bitter reality is that poverty and hunger are now worse than 30 years ago.

The Constitution recognises the right of everyone to have access to sufficient food, and the right of every child to basic nutrition. The persistence of widespread hunger therefore represents a profound failure to realise rights that are already guaranteed in law.

The reality is that hunger is a political crisis that will only be resolved if there is sufficient political will.

Abahlali are part of the Union Against Hunger which is building a broad alliance of popular forces to address the crisis of hunger. Together we are struggling to generate the political will to resolve this crisis. The Union Against Hunger is making a submission to the inquiry.

Our view is that the following measures need to be urgently taken to address the crisis of hunger:

1.⁠ ⁠We need a universal income grant of R1 500 for the unemployed and working poor.
2.⁠ ⁠Basic food items need to be subsidised.
3.⁠ ⁠The social value of land must be placed before its commercial value and there must be a massive programme of urban and rural land reform – along with support in terms of seeds, tools and irrigation – to allow people to grow their own food.
4.⁠ ⁠There must be strong support for rural and urban communes and cooperatives.
5.⁠ ⁠There needs to be a system of state supported markets so that people can grow and sell healthy food outside of the control of the supermarket system. People must be able to use SASSA cards at these markets.
6.⁠ ⁠There must be a massive public education programme warning people about unhealthy foods such as sugary drinks.
7.⁠ ⁠Unhealthy foods must be taxed and the money used to subsidise healthy foods.
8.⁠ ⁠There must be strong measures against corporates that are colluding in order to make food expensive.
9.⁠ ⁠There must be an end to evictions from occupied land that has been decommodified and is being used for social purposes.
10.⁠ ⁠There must be extra tax on supermarket profits, and the hugely excessive salaries of their bosses, to subsidise healthy food and grassroots cooperatives.

Thapelo Mohapi 084 576 5117
Sinenhlanhla Mcanyana 073 832 3331
Mqapheli Bonono 073 067 3274