The South African Food Sovereignty Campaign (SAFSC) emerged during early 2015
in response to a range of brutalities affecting a large proportion of South Africa’s poor,
particularly small-scale farmers and swathes of the population who are at risk of going
hungry, or who are currently experiencing powerlessness associated with hunger. Of
particular importance to the campaign is the unjust, unsafe and unsustainable food
system (Cock, 2014:53), which actors in the campaign argue requires fundamental
transformation before it can cater to the needs of the hungry in South Africa over the
needs of profit for corporations.
This research, which makes use of the SAFSC as a case study, aims to explore how
the food sovereignty framework is being pursued by grassroots activists in South
Africa to address hunger at its roots, namely at the food system level. To set the scene
for the research I first describe the South African food system to reveal its brutalities
in the form of corporate concentration, land dispossession, malnutrition, environmental
degradation and hunger, to name a few. Thereafter I explore current solutions
undertaken by the state, business and NGOs which aim to address hunger. After
presenting these policies and programmes I provide a food sovereignty critique of
them, showing how despite their reach and at times their valuable contribution to
nutrition in a highly malnourished country, South Africa still remains largely food
insecure (and unsovereign). This is because often policy and programmes do not
address the root causes of hunger, namely the lack of democracy in the food system
– I elaborate on this root cause in the sections below. Finally, I explore the SAFSC, a
campaign which came together to unite grassroots’ struggles for a more just and
sustainable food system. I explore the genesis of the campaign, the actors in the
campaign and show how they understand food sovereignty and further practise it to
provide systemic alternatives to the current unjust food system.
Below, I discuss this unjust food system and show how my research fills a gap in the
literature on food sovereignty, particularly on food sovereignty in South Africa, which
is currently sparse. Thereafter, I further elaborate the research objectives, and finally
conclude this chapter by outlining the structure of this research report. Below, I begin
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my discussion on the unjust South African food system by outlining the story of a bread
distributor.