Durban - Hunger and frustration could ignite unrest across the country as greater numbers of South Africans face starvation every day.
Organisations that provide food to the hungry say they can’t keep up with the growing need for assistance as the queues become longer and their budgets battle.
They’ve warned that hunger pangs, exacerbated by unemployment, rising food costs, inflation and business closures as a result of load shedding, could lead to a surge in crime or even cause people to take to the country’s streets.
As hunger and malnutrition spiral out of control, Statistics SA said the latest Consumer Price Index showed that inflation for food and non-alcoholic beverages spiked by 14% in the 12 months up to March. It said this represented the largest annual increase since the 14.7% rise in March 2009.
“A lot of children are turning to petty crime just to eat,” said Meals on Wheels (MOW) programmes director Gershon Naidoo.
He said they fed at least 180 000 people a day, providing about five million meals a month, but this was a drop in the ocean of ever-growing need.
Between October and March this year, MOW spent R30m on food for their own kitchens and organisations they support.
“Our stress is that we are not making a big enough impact,” he said.
Naidoo said the crisis was evident in the increased number of beggars on the street, malnourished children who performed poorly at school and the number of requests for assistance that his organisation fielded every day.
“When people are hungry, it moves them closer and closer to anarchy,” he warned.
MOW was established 59 years ago to serve the elderly nationwide, but because of the number of people who had no access to food, they expanded their feeding scheme to include children and adults. Now they also provide food to people living in informal settlements and some schools, and say the money they get from the government for these programmes was not enough.
Naidoo said MOW was supported by a range of business donors, but the “giving community” was generally from the middle-income group and, because of the current economic situation, that support was shrinking.
Research organisation, the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group, said the cost of a basket of food containing basic items that women from low-income groups said they would buy for a household of seven people, amounted to R4 966.20, R516.12 more from March 2022 to 2023.
It said even though the national minimum wage was increased by 9.6% at the beginning of March, bringing the wages up to R4 473.92 for a full month’s work, it was still not enough to afford this basket of food.
Programme co-ordinator Mervyn Abrahams said: “The only way we can access food is with the amount of money we have in our pockets, so it's a question of affordability. The problem is that our wages and social grants are much too low for people to be able to afford sufficient food.”
He said this was evident in the rate of malnutrition and stunting among adults and children.
Abrahams said according to the National Treasury, the national poverty line was R663, which was just to have enough food. But the child support grant was way below this threshold and their calculations showed it cost R838.04 to feed a child sufficient and nutritious food.
He said people were forced to cut back on the amount and the quality of the food they could buy.
“The lower the food is in nutrition, the cheaper it generally is.”
“There's a direct connection between hunger and crime. I’m not surprised by the level of crime in SA, especially petty crime,” said Abrahams.
He warned that the Reserve Bank’s attempts to stem rising inflation by hiking interest rates only served banks and other financial institutions, not ordinary people.
Ladles of Love, which operates in Cape Town and parts of Gauteng, said the lines for food were becoming longer.
They currently provide a million meals a month to people on the Cape Flats and townships around Cape Town and Gauteng.
The organisation’s Togeda Adams said the need for food surged during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when many people lost their jobs, and Ladles of Love rapidly increased the number of kitchens feeding the community.
They started in 2014 with one kitchen; during the pandemic it mushroomed and they currently operate or support more than 200 soup kitchens.
Adams said donor fatigue had set in and, because Covid-19 was no longer considered an emergency, they received fewer donations.
Despite this, they were trying to include more early childhood development centres in their feeding programme because the child support grant wasn't enough for families to buy food.
“The hard truth is that without these meals, many people would have nothing to eat for an entire day. Principals say that children leave after the 4pm snack on a Friday. When they return on a Monday they are starving because they had nothing to eat all weekend,” said Adams.
All organisations said most soup kitchens did not operate every day and very few opened on weekends because the people who cooked also needed a break. There were also more safety concerns for these organisations because of increased substance abuse on weekends.
Adams said Ladles of Love supplied kitchens with ingredients and the only payment the volunteers received was a plate of food.
She had also witnessed the growing anger and frustration, especially among men who were usually only served after children, the elderly and women had been fed.
“A lot of times the food runs out when it gets to the males. You need to have a firm hand on these queues because people get angry and accuse others of cutting the line or going twice and people become worried they might not get food,” said Adams.
In some places, they had men who guarded the queues but ultimately it was the “mama warriors”, women who lived in the community and knew everyone, who ensured that no one stepped out of line.
Last year. at least seven children died of severe malnutrition in Butterworth in the Eastern Cape and the Gift of the Givers says the situation remains dire.
The organisation’s Corene Conradie said in the Eastern Cape, where they were involved with 50 soup kitchens, many people were undocumented and the statistics were not a true reflection of the enormity of the problem.
“Children are dying as we speak. Schools can’t keep up with the amount of hungry children,” she said.
Conradie said many old-age homes were also unable to provide their residents with meals.
“In East London, every Wednesday is refuse removal day and every Wednesday families scratch in bins for food and lick the bones that they find because they have nothing else to eat,” she said.
The Gift of the Givers representative in the Northern Cape, Emily Thomas, said farming and mines provided many of the jobs and resulted in “seasonal hunger” as the workers were only employed for specific periods of time.
From as early as 5am, people would place their bowls outside the soup kitchens to ensure that when they returned, they would be ahead of others in the queue and be guaranteed a meal for the day.
Thomas said two years ago they were involved in two soup kitchens in the Northern Cape, now they had 15 across the province.
She said poverty, coupled with alcohol and substance abuse, had increased the number of starving people.
Sometimes Gift of the Givers receive the names of 500 people who need food hampers, but when they arrive to deliver them there are 1 000 people. At one stage, they had to close their truck and leave because the situation “got out of hand”.
In another incident, a young man tried to stab the volunteers because he was so desperate for food, she said.
“There’s a lot of frustration among young people, even the sober-minded ones,” said Thomas.
She described the Northern Cape as “the forgotten province” and said the level of poverty was heart wrenching. Often those who worked on the grape farms ended up with no food during the off-season and all they would have to eat was raisins from the farms where they had worked.
Gift of the Givers often got requests for food from clinics because cancer, HIV and TB patients were defaulting on their medication because they had no food.
“People with nothing will just boil a pot of water because they believe they are inviting hope into their homes and maybe then food will arrive,” said Thomas.
She said more skills-development programmes were needed in the province because young people finished matric and ended up literally just sitting at home, in the streets or outside shops, and often ended up in gangs.
“We must teach them how to work with money and start businesses because people from Somalia will come here and put up shop anywhere they find a gap and make a fortune. But our people don’t know how to do that,” she said.
Between March 2022 and March 2023 the following prices increases have taken place:
- 30kg of maize meal increased by 26% or R63.12.
- 10kg of cake flour increased by 20% or R20.51.
- Cooking oil is still 16% more expensive than a year ago, even though it has been decreasing in price.
- 10kg potatoes costs 52% more.
- 10kg onions costs 67% more.
- Brown bread is 17% more expensive.
The Independent on Saturday