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SA: John Jeffery: Address by the Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, at a dialogue and launch of ‘The Right to Food in South Africa: An analysis of the content, policy effort, resource allocation and enjoyment of the constitutional

SA: John Jeffery: Address by the Deputy Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, at a dialogue and launch of ‘The Right to Food in South Africa: An analysis of the content, policy effort, resource allocation and enjoyment of the constitutional

30th July 2015

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Director of SPII, Ms Isobel Frye
Director of Oxfam, Ms Sipho Mthathi
Representatives from various government departments
Representatives from civil society
Ladies and gentlemen, friends
                                    
In a Mail and Guardian article called “Too many going hungry in the land of plenty”, published in October last year, journalist Sipho Kings points to World Bank statistics which show that the top 10% of our country’s households spend 10% of their income on food – an average of R29 000 a year. The bottom 25% of households spend 48% of their income on food – R8 700 a year.

The article also tells us about Elzetta, a 23-year old living in Bloemendal in the Eastern Cape. Elzetta has to support her twin sister and their two children. The sisters take turns doing odd jobs, so one of them can stay at home to look after their children. Elzetta’s daily food budget is six rand – R3 for four potatoes and R3 for a cup of rice. When they cannot afford the R6 they turn to the staple diet of many poor people in the area – the ”poppie water diet”, which consists of slices of white bread and a carton of cheap and sugary juice.

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According to a 2104 report by Oxfam, South Africa is considered a food-secure nation, producing enough calories to adequately feed every one of its 53 million people.

However, the reality is that one in four people currently suffers hunger on a regular basis and more than half of the population are at risk of going hungry.

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The most food-insecure households were those headed by women or children. Women face hunger more often than men, due to disparities in income, limited access to employment or means of production and cultural practices.

Fewer than 2 percent of households grow the majority of their own food, and the majority of small scale producers in rural areas are unable to feed their families.

What the Oxfam report makes clear is that this hunger is not a product of a failure in food production but in the pricing of quality food and in people’s ability to afford it.

Many of you will, no doubt, also be familiar with SANHANES-1 – the SA national health and nutrition examination survey. According to this study, the Eastern Cape, followed by Limpopo, had the highest numbers of citizens experiencing food insecurity.

The right to food, both in South Africa and internationally, is based on the multi-dimensional concept of food security. Food security is not dependent solely on the availability of food. Food availability is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for ensuring that a community is food secure.

Then there are the concepts of food justice and food sovereignty. The food sovereignty movement seeks to ensure the right to food, but with the additional emphasis on the need for political and economic reform of food systems so that more control is given to communities and small, local producers.

Sasha Stevenson of Section27 argues that the problem in South Africa, as in the rest of the world is not with the production of food, it is with the food system.

I want to stress that we must remember that the food system consists of both public and private sector role-players. The food system is not something that government alone, or the market alone, can address. As government’s National Development Plan 2030 states, we must ensure household food and nutrition security involving both public and private sector action.

Stevenson argues that:
“… the end of Apartheid saw a move away from state regulation of the agricultural sector that had, for years, privileged white farmers. Liberalisation of trade and the ending of agricultural marketing boards ushered in the restructuring of the agricultural market. Co-operatives bought state-built infrastructure such as silos and were converted to private companies.

The private companies in turn consolidated, many turning into large agro-processing concerns, and value chains were integrated. Perhaps surprisingly in the context of a revolution that promised to extend opportunity to the historically oppressed majority, the sector became more concentrated.

As the number of players in the business shrunk, private power replaced state power.”

The right to food is a human right recognised under national and international law, which protects the right of people to access food, either by producing their food or by purchasing it.

The right to food is intricately linked to one’s right to life and dignity and requires that food be available, accessible and adequate for everyone without discrimination.

The right to food is protected in three different articles of the Constitution.

Very often the focus is mainly on section 27, as this is the principal provision which entrenches everyone's right to have access to sufficient food and water.

But is equally important to note the provisions of section 28(1)(c) which states that every child has the right to basic nutrition and section 35(2)(e) which provides that everyone who is detained, including every sentenced prisoner, has the right to conditions of detention that are consistent with human dignity including the provision, at state expense, of adequate nutrition.

While the general right to food in section 27 is subject to available resources, no such limitation is listed on the nutrition rights of the child and of detained persons.
The right of access to food, like other socio-economic rights, is justiciable, and the South African Human Rights Commission is mandated to monitor all human rights, including the right to food.

Under a rights based system such as ours, government must provide an enabling environment in which people can adequately produce or procure food for themselves and their families. In order to purchase food, a person must have access to an income. Part of such an enabling environment, in circumstances of food insecurity, is for government to ensure access to social security for those that do not have an income.  In this regard, government is currently providing more than 16 million social grants per month.

Looking more closely at the right to food in section 27, it is clear that this section imposes both positive and negative obligations on the State. With regards to the negative obligation, in its simplest form, it means that the state may not do anything that would be a direct negative infringement of the right. In other words, it may not do anything that would lead to a decline of the right in question.

The positive duties imposed on the state were carefully considered in the Grootboom case. The court held that the right of “access” to the particular socio-economic goods listed in section 26(1) and 27(1) is not a self-standing positive entitlement beyond granting a right of access to whatever services are provided by the state in fulfilment of its obligations in sections 26(2) and 27(2).

According to the court the formulation of the socio-economic right delimits the state’s positive obligations, qualifying them in 3 ways – firstly, the obligation to take reasonable legislative and other measures; secondly, to achieve the progressive realisation of the right and thirdly, within available resources.

What does this mean in practice?

In both Grootboom and the TAC case the Constitutional Court emphasised that the positive obligations imposed on the state by sections 26(1) and 27(1) are in their totality described in sections 26(2) and 27(2) respectively. This means that the positive duty placed on the state by section 27(1) is a duty to develop and implement policies to realise socio-economic rights that are reasonable in light of the available resources, taking into account that socio-economic rights have to be realised progressively.

The Court has quite extensively described what is required for a policy to be reasonable: it must be rational, inclusive, coherent, coordinated, flexible enough to respond to both short- and longer-term needs, and effectively implemented.

Prof Danie Brand of the University of Pretoria highlights that of these requirements, two are particularly relevant to a discussion of the right to food in South Africa.

The first is the requirement of reasonable inclusion, which holds that a policy, to be reasonable, should "respond to the needs of those most desperate” and take into account the "amelioration of the circumstances of those in crisis".

This requirement, in slightly different guises, was proffered by the Court in both Grootboom and the TAC cases as the basis for its decision that the policies in question in those cases were unreasonable.

The second is the requirement that, to pass constitutional muster, a policy framework must be coherent and coordinated, that is, it must clearly allocate responsibilities and tasks to the different spheres of government.

The right to food has no single, specific government department at national, provincial or local level dedicated primarily or exclusively and in the first instance to its realisation - The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, the Department of Health and the Department of Social Development, among others, all have a role to play in ensuring that the state discharges its responsibilities in relation to this right.

Some may argue that it is best to encapsulate the right to food in one single, overarching policy framework, driven by one department.

But, argues Prof Brand, because the right to food is so specially dependent on realising other rights for its own realisation, it makes good sense that different departments are responsible for different aspects of food security.

Food security features prominently in government’s National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP stresses that we must realise a food trade surplus with one-third produced by small-scale farmers or households. We must ensure household food and nutrition security involving both public and private sector action, the cost of food must be reduced, policies should focus on increasing competitiveness and investing in new infrastructure in the food value chain and strengthening regional cooperation in food and energy markets and water management.

Apart from social security and a variety of poverty alleviation initiatives, government has many policies and programmes focussing specifically on food and nutrition.
For example, nine million children are benefitting from the school feeding scheme, ensuring that they no longer have to be hungry at school.

The Department of Health has implemented various nutrition interventions. Some programmes are included in health lifestyles programmes and various information and communication programmes on nutrition.

Other initiatives include the fortification of staple food with selected vitamins and minerals to address micronutrient deficiencies in the South African population. New Regulations relating to the Labeling and Advertising of Foodstuffs which came into effect in May 2012 aim to empower citizens to make healthy food choices.

The Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries was mandated to develop agricultural policies and support programmes to ensure that persons are given agricultural opportunities that will enable them to meet their basic food needs.

The department has initiated a number of programmes that are meant to contribute positively to food security in the country. It has prioritised the development of appropriate agricultural skills among those previously excluded to ensure equitable participation in the agricultural sector.

The Policy on Food and Nutrition Security, gazetted in August 2014, outlines important initiatives to deal with hunger and food insecurity. Among the policy’s stated goals are increasing food production and distribution, as well as supporting community-based and small holder production. The document cites five pillars as underlying the policy’s strategies, including:

    The need for improved nutritional safety nets by state, private and non-governmental actors;
    Better nutritional education;
    Increased investment in agricultural, particularly in rural areas, to improve the efficiency of food storage and distribution networks, as well as access to inputs;
    Better market participation of emerging farmers through public-private partnerships; and
    Food security risk management.

The policy also touches on food security measures, the impact of climate change and the creation of a centralised food security control system.

The policy is accompanied by a draft implementation plan. This plan includes a rapid assessment of current food security measures in the country outlining challenges and weaknesses.

The plan proposes conducting a baseline survey prior to implementation and once indicators have been agreed upon through workshops. It also proposes the development of a participatory monitoring and evaluation mechanism among other things.

What are some of our biggest challenges? Climate change threatens to increase hunger, in our country and worldwide. Communities reported increasing occurrences of extreme weather such as heavy rains and flash floods, frosts and blistering morning temperatures, as well as creeping changes in rainfall patterns, a blurring of the seasons and changes in planting/harvesting seasons.

By 2050, climate change and erratic weather patterns could have pushed another 24 million children into hunger. Almost half of these children would be in sub-Saharan Africa.

In order to respond to the impacts of climate change, and to contribute to the international effort to mitigate climate change, our government, in consultation with business, labour and civil society, has drafted the National Climate Change Response White Paper. The white paper outlines the policies, principles and strategies the country will use to respond to climate change.

Josee Koch, writing on the Food Security Policy Context in SA in 2011, said that there is no specific and accepted measure of food insecurity and no standardised way of monitoring it. Moreover, food security is multidimensional and changes often over time, making it almost a moving target for which it is difficult to design accurate measurements and policy targets. Working Paper No 11 – the Right to Food Report – goes a long way in addressing this issue.

The Right to Food Report is undertaken as part of the Socio Economic Rights Monitoring Tool project conducted by SPII with the support of Ford Foundation and in partnership with the South African Human Rights Commission.

The objective of this project, through the combination of policy and budget analysis and statistical indicators, is to provide a comprehensive framework and set of tools to monitor and guide the progressive realisation of socio-economic rights.

I want to commend SPII for the work it is undertaking. Studies on social security, healthcare and human settlements have already been completed. Today is the launch of the Right to Food Report and the SPII is currently finalising education. By March 2016 it is envisaged that land, water and sanitation will be concluded.

To conclude, ladies and gentlemen,
Natalia Alonso, the head of Oxfam’s EU Advocacy Office said:
“The global food system is not just under stress – it’s broken. It’s broken because we produce enough food for everyone and still we have nearly 900 million people hungry and around two billion suffering from malnutrition. And it’s broken because it is not fit to cope with extreme weather events, or the scarcity of natural resources.
We need to change that. “

Today’s event is a step forward in bringing about that change.

I thank you.

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