SA ’ s children are dying of hunger
Millions of children all over the country are being neglected by the very government that is meant to protect them
● Soon street poles will be adorned with election posters, and smiling party leaders will exhort us to choose them in this year’s general elections. It will be a time of faux caring engagements for photo ops and the rural hinterlands will be cynically spruced up and flooded with grand promises, meagre food parcels and one-wash T-shirts.
In the swirl of the posturing and promises, uncomfortable truths about our ruling party and nation will temporarily be suspended because epic failures such as hunger and poverty, even children dying of malnutrition, must only be found in manifestos as future crises to be solved.
But let’s be clear. The ANC government is failing millions of children. Their bright futures are being downgraded to junk status.
We are a nation with a silent epidemic of hunger that a food parcel cannot cure, and South Africans, particularly children, have been abandoned by the very government tasked with fulfilling their right to food and nutrition enshrined in the constitution.
Equally culpable is the food industry, which seems to view food as a profit-making commodity, unfettered by the responsibility of ensuring food for all in a wealthy country with the productive capacity to feed every person. In the absence of sufficient industry conscience, it is incumbent on the government to define and enforce this responsibility.
The South African Human Rights Commission’s (SAHRC’s) 2023 report on “Child Malnutrition and the Right to Food in the Eastern Cape” lays bare in 94 devasting pages the avoidable tragic consequences of malnutrition. All the statistics confirm what has been described as the slow violence of hunger in South Africa.
The department of health, answering a parliamentary question last year, admitted that every year more than 15,000 children are diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, with 1,000 dying directly from it. A 2022 research study showed that malnutrition is the underlying cause of death in a third of child deaths in South Africa — another 10,000 deaths a year. A quarter (27%) of children under five are stunted due to chronic malnutrition.
While the World Bank defines South Africa as a middle-income country with a gross national income per capita of $7,055 (about R133,000) it also describes it as the world’s most unequal nation. In 2022 it called the inequality of opportunity in South Africa exceptional, meaning that most citizens are born into a poverty trap that neither they nor their children are likely to escape. Lives are still informed by the legacy of apartheid and further entrenched because of a lack of post-apartheid transformation.
In 2016, economist Anna Orthofer calculated that the top 10% of the population held 90%–95% of all wealth while the poorest 50%, who earn about 10% of all income, own no measurable wealth. According to the World Bank’s Human Capital Index, children born today can expect to attain only 43% of their potential by age 18, mainly due to stunting and poor learning outcomes. This makes a mockery of the words of former president Nelson Mandela when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 that “children must, at last, play in the veld, no longer tortured by the pangs of hunger or ravaged by disease, or threatened with the scourge of ignorance, molestation and abuse”.
In its November 2023 Household Affordability Index, the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group (PMEJD) showed 25.2% or 13.8-million South Africans live below the official food poverty line of R760. More than a third of children live in households with income below the food poverty line.
The PMEJD calculated the average monthly cost of a child’s basic nutritious diet in November 2023 as R946.98, showing that the R510 child support grant (CSG) falls short of both the cost of a nutritious diet and the food poverty line of R760.
Deaths caused by severe acute malnutrition were the leading causes among under-fives from 2015-2019 (apart from 2018), with 5,336 recorded by the department of health. Half of all child deaths in hospitals in 2018 had malnutrition as a contributing cause.
South Africa’s stunting rate of 27% among children under five is unacceptably high for a middle-income country. Stunting due to long-term nutritional deprivation often results in delayed mental development, poor school performance and reduced intellectual capacity. In turn, this affects economic productivity.
A 2023 report by the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town found that if the government maintains the low value of the CSG, child food poverty is likely to increase.
The DG Murray Trust believes there is no need for the status quo to remain. It is not preordained that children in South Africa must die of hunger. The CSG has been rightly hailed as a successful intervention in child poverty. But it is just not enough.
In its 2022 submission to the SAHRC’s inquiry, Unicef South Africa argued that the long-term consequences of malnutrition are more expensive to treat than the short-term cost of raising the CSG. Unicef supported using cash-plus programmes, which combine cash transfers with other interventions such as nutrition education and access to health care.
The Children’s Institute, in its 2023 report on the CSG, advocates a phased approach “that does not shock the national budget but still achieves substantial poverty reduction effects for children within five years”. The SAHRC called for a top-up nutrition grant. “Such an enhancement would align with the state’s constitutional obligation to ensure that children receive the nutrition they require.”
There has been an equally urgent call to extend the grant into pregnancy. The government also urgently needs to address the lack of co-ordination and focus on nutrition to give real effect to the most recent National Food and Nutrition Security Plan.
There is an acknowledgement that civil society organisations and the private sector have become essential actors in the food security and nutrition space, and these partnerships can be strengthened considerably through government collaboration.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has made two critical public statements about the role of nutrition, poverty and the wellbeing of children. Yet, while the ANC’s 2019 manifesto mentions children 11 times, nothing is said about child hunger and nutrition. Hunger is mentioned only once in the context of land reform. Malnutrition is never mentioned.