SWOP-SHOP PANTRIES DISRUPT SOCIETAL HIERARCHIES

SOME analysts consider it subversive behaviour when citizens set up community pantries, as many South Africans did as the impact of the pandemic deepened and local hunger increased over time.

Community pantries are local stores where members of the community, with little or no access to it, can at no charge receive food and other goods to serve basic needs.

Such pantries take different forms. They range from large-scale food security programmes on international and national levels, to governmental programmes and NGOs working for food redistribution, as well as informal pantries arranged by locals for destitute members of their community.

Often pantries also take the form of swop shops, where locals are free to bring food produce or goods and take away other items they need.

Such local pantries represent a type of free trade where patrons are not required to exchange goods to receive food but are free to do so if possible.

In doing so, swop-shop pantries redefine the common understanding of the roles of participants of philanthropic givers and indigent receivers – it remakes the relationship as one of equals who bring different contributions to share as and when they can.

It seems inevitable that such local pantries would not form part of formal structures to address food insecurity, since the extent of the challenge demands no less than global and societywide level interventions.

Such interventions need measures to ensure the vast contributions made by countless individuals and collectives reach the intended recipients and do so fairly and equitably, avoiding abuses.

However, it seems precisely the scale of the problem and of the interventions that societies build to meet the need that unwittingly keep the givers and receivers stuck in the socio-political roles of the haves and the haves-not – the hidden structure of societies from which the problem originates in the first place.

Societal hierarchies determine different levels of access to resources, with those placed higher holding greater opportunities and means to gain resources, and those placed lower less able to do so.

This societal dynamic holds not only for economic, political and cultural structures and systems of participation, but plainly also for the flow of basic goods and food.

Read in this way, it follows that in such societal hierarchies it is only by way of calling on the humane commitments of those with more access at the top to share their resources with those without access at the bottom that the problem can be resolved.

It is the solidity of hierarchies that the swop-shop pantry disrupts, which, arguably, represents a hidden reason that scepticism regarding informal community pantries remains.

Such pantries signify projects in “food sovereignty”, rather than projects to achieve food security. Food sovereignty refers to situations where the citizens and collectives that produce, share and consume food also determine and control the methods and means of its production, distribution and use.

Read in this way, the authorship, authority and accountability for food security and the relationships among its citizens and collectives rest squarely in the hands of the local community.

In doing so it distances itself from societal structures of control and therefore disrupts local dependence on the hierarchies of formal policy and controls.

These pantries disrupt initiatives that continue to define participants as philanthropic givers and indigent receivers, and keep the distances between them in place.

In this way, food pantries represent a growing movement of new forms of citizen solidarity, as they did during a global pandemic.

* Buys is Executive Dean at the non-profit higher education institution Cornerstone Institute, and editor of the