Publication: Food Security Working Paper #002
According to most subjective and self-reported indicators, food security in South Africa is improving over time. However, objectively measured anthropometric indicators record only a marginal improvement in children’s nutrition status since the early 1990s. This is despite the introduction in 1998 and subsequent expansion of the Child Support Grant, which now reaches over 11 million children in South Africa and has been found to increase food consumption and dietary diversity in poor households. How can this paradox be explained? This paper reviews the evidence on food security and child nutrition trends in South Africa and identifies several reasons why nutrition outcomes appear to be lagging behind improvements in other food security indicators.
related Publications
Engaging civil society organisations in food security governance in the Western Cape: Reflections from emergency food relief during COVID
Even before the COVID-19 crisis, South Africa was experiencing a food crisis but this was deepened and made more visceral by the subsequent lockdown. Low-income households bore the brunt of this economic and social shock: 3 million jobs were lost; two in every five adults reported that their household lost its ...
Journal Articles
Social protection responses to COVID-19 in Africa
Food Sensitive Planning and Urban Design – A Blueprint for a Future South African City?
South Africa’s demographic profile is predominantly urban. As a result of our history, South Africa’s food system was largely an urban food system before the country’s demographic shift to being predominantly urban. It is therefore strange, that one of the key public goods, food, is absent from ...