This paper aims to review what is currently known about the role played by the informal sector in general and informal retailers in particular, in the accessibility of food in South Africa. The review seeks to identify policy relevant research gaps. Drawing on Statistics South Africa data, we show that the informal sector is an important source of employment, dominated by informal trade with the sale of food a significant subsector within this trade. We then turn our attention to what is known about the informal sector’s role in food sourcing of poorer households.
African Food Security Urban Network’s surveys show that urban residents and particularly low income households regularly sourced food from the informal sector and we explore why this might be the case through an expanded view of access. We then consider existing evidence on the implications of increased supermarket penetration for informal retailers and food security.
Having established the importance of the informal sector, we turn our attention to the policy environment. First we assess the food security policy position and then the post-apartheid policy response to the informal sector – nationally, in provinces, and in key urban centres. We trace a productionist and rural bias in the food security agenda and argue that the policy environment for informal operators is at best benign neglect and at worse actively destructive, with serious food security implications.
Throughout the paper we draw on regional and international evidence to locate the South African issues within wider related trends.
This paper seeks to assess the state of knowledge in relation to the interrelated subjects of value chains, livelihoods, food systems, and regulatory dynamics in South Africa’s large- and small-scale fisheries. South Africa’s marine fisheries play an important role in sustaining the livelihoods and food security of poorer coastal communities. However, the post-apartheid fisheries dispensation is marked by structural inequalities between large- and small-scale fisheries sectors, with direct implications for livelihoods and food security.
Addressing these inequalities in practice requires a critical understanding of South Africa’s fisheries economy and governance system, and in particular, the way that benefits from the country’s marine commons are distributed within society. As a means to assess the state of knowledge regarding these subjects, the paper reviews key literature that engages with small- and large-scale fisheries value chains, and the livelihoods and food systems they sustain.
Literature on fisheries governance is also reviewed to assess how fisheries value chains are shaped by the regulatory environment.
Having reviewed what is known in the literature about South Africa’s fisheries economy and governance system, the paper briefly considers the implications of this knowledge for small-scale fisheries value chains, and for the local livelihoods and food systems of poorer coastal communities who depend on small-scale fisheries. The paper also identifies important knowledge gaps and future research objectives in relation to the economics and power dynamics of fisheries value chains.
Finally, the paper discusses key themes emerging from the literature that help to shed light on the current process in South Africa’s fisheries.
This state of the knowledge review sets out to identify the main research themes and findings in the literature on labour relations and conditions on Western Cape fruit farms over the past 20 years. The paper also compares if and how farmworker livelihoods have changed since the heyday of Apartheid, and the role of the state in these changes. While farmworkers enjoy vastly more legal protection than in the past most may, in fact, be worse off economically.
This lack of improvement can be attributed to the state’s contradictory policy approach to the sector: while it extended protection to farmworkers post-1994, it withdrew support from producers, especially regulatory support that previously forced them to bargain collectively with international retailers. Since 1994, international retailers have increasingly consolidated and formed buyer monopolies, so producers now face extremely powerful bargaining partners as individuals and have therefore become price takers.
To protect their profit margins, producers have externalised and casualised their labour forces, and moved workers off-farm. The research points to the limited power of the state to regulate employer-employee relations that are embedded in global value chains, and to the problematic of relying on a narrowly rights-based approach to remedy working conditions. While aiming to regulate employer-employee relations within its national jurisdiction, the state has failed to insulate such relations from the power wielded in the global fruit value chain that shapes relations right into the farmyard. Such power relations not only shape the commercial relations between international retailers and local producers, but also between local producers and their workers.
The review also highlights the importance of analysing producer agency in contesting or circumventing state policy decisions, which ultimately affect workers’ livelihoods. Yet, the paper points out that worker and producer responses to the impacts on them have been under-explored.
This report examines how the food systems in South Africa, Brazil and Mexico are dominated by a small group of MNCs of both foreign and national origin that play a significant role in agricultural inputs and production, processing and manufacturing of foodstuffs, procurement, storage and transportation, retailing and consumption. Many studies of the food system track individual commodities, such as staple food items, in order to understand MNC dominance. However this approach carries the risk of underestimating the ownership and market share of conglomerates, and to their privileged access to information, capital, and political power, which operate and are dominant in more than one commodity chain. This report has therefore combined a review of the pathways of economic and political influence of MNCs in the food system with a value chain (VC) analysis as the lens through which to gauge the footprint of these so-called “stateless corporations” operating across the different nodes of the food systems in these three countries, and analyses the resulting impacts of this footprint.
Little is known about how individual abilities and food security determinants – at the scale of everyday life – connect to formal and informal value chains, and broader urban structural systems in which daily processes are embedded. Structural inequalities in urban systems make it difficult to translate economic development into improved food security at different city, household or individual scales. Exploring current a-scalar and anti-urban food security policies and practice in Southern Africa, the paper argues that everyday food security strategies – which enable food access and sharing in food communities – are enmeshed in local food system structures. Everyday food strategies are a critical source of livelihoods and are also deeply relational processes, tied to power, identity and agency. The paper also looks at how contextualised food security outcomes are affected by place, space and negotiations of everyday life. The aim is to challenge narrow value chain theories that do not recognise the ‘other’ – currently invisible networks and interactions – in and between local food value chains, such as what and who constitutes value, and who holds the power to assign value in local food networks. The paper draws on a wide literature review and in-depth qualitative work conducted in Lusaka, Zambia. The paper concludes arguing that deeper nuances affect everyday food security outcomes, and this paper purposefully furthers the current (limited) conversation and empirical understanding of food security within value chains analysis.
In order to create credibility and sustainability between policies, to avoid political confusion and to reassure “investor confidence”, a clear agri-food policy package needs to be in place. To achieve this, policy packages should be constructed to give coherence, with an explicit goal and set of objectives, underscoring accountability to delivery. Considering current policy debates, the questions pursued in this paper are: does a clear vision guide existing and emerging agriculture and food policies and are a clear set of measures defined to achieve this vision? By analysing several relevant policies, the paper argues that South African food and agricultural policy profoundly lacks coherence. Although policy may seem to be aligned at one level, the reality of implementation and the political rhetoric emerging around food and agriculture tells a different story. This lack of coherence has important implications for a food system that is faltering in many respects, and for research or processes intended to inform evidence-based policy.
The availability and accessibility of food is constrained by the environments where people live, work and purchase goods, and the pathways which they use to traverse these. This recognition has given rise to innovative conceptual frameworks including “food environments” and “food deserts”. These concepts add a spatial dimension to food security research that could inform food systems governance. Although the concepts have expanded the understanding of food security in the global North, their application to the South African context, and to value chains analysis, is still in its infancy. This paper introduces these frameworks and considers their utility in South African cities. The paper presents recent data emerging from case studies of local food geographies conducted by the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN). This research proceeded from recognising the importance of informal retail in South African urban food systems. The case studies mapped formal sector food retail outlets in urban Johannesburg, correlating these with socio-economic data. Informal food processing and trade were also mapped in smaller research areas to explore food prevalence and diversity in the local geography and map the spatial patterns of informal food outlets. These studies reveal that the distribution of supermarkets entrenches spatial inequalities and constrains access to food distributed through formal value chains.
The studies also reveal spatial and temporal patterns of informal food retail, which provides diverse food retail outlets clustered around public transport access points, along high traffic pedestrian routes, and distributed throughout residential spaces. Although healthy foods are available, unhealthy foods and risky food environments are pervasive. These findings confirm that the concept of food deserts fails to reflect the diversity of food available and accessible through informal livelihoods and suggests that scalar network models of food geographies offer better conceptual frameworks.
Food insecurity is a challenge for most countries in the Global South. South Africa is no exception – a significant proportion of its population still remains in poverty and is therefore vulnerable to food insecurity. This paper argues that although South Africa is food secure at national level, such security is only true of caloric and not nutrient requirements. A section of the country still struggles to access food and survives on the margins – typified by the existence of malnutrition on one hand and on the other hand, the consumption of inappropriate foods leading to obesity. Poverty and unemployment are the major drivers of this insecurity and these should be addressed if the country aims to achieve food security for disparate sections of the South African society. But how are affected households and individuals coping with threats to food security? The paper shows that poor households in the country adopt a range of strategies for survival, such as borrowing from micro-lenders, substituting foods with cheaper ones, and disposing off assets. In conclusion, the paper points out that it is in South Africa’s power to prioritise food security through various instruments as laid out in the country’s food security strategy.
South African food systems are in a dynamic process of transition due to changes in food value chain regimes which have major impacts on the poor. However, these transitions are also shaped by demand-side drivers emerging from the ‘foodways of the poor’ – the ways poor people access food, what kinds of food they purchase, how they are consumed, and the culturally-conditioned meanings ascribed to food and eating. To explore these demand-side influences, this paper first considers contrasting current understandings of what poverty is, and who and where the poor are in South Africa. The paper then considers recent research findings that cast light on what poor people eat and where they get food, and how this contrasts with the foodways of better-off people. The emerging patterns – a predilection for cheap grain staples, sugar, soft drinks and chicken frequently sourced through informal channels – suggest that, next to structural determinants such as price and convenience, the symbolic and aspirational domain of food aesthetics and the social functions of visible consumption as symbols of wealth are key forces shaping the foodways of the poor. The provisioning strategies and preferences of the poor – about half of the South African population – emerge as powerful forces rippling back up value chains, and contributing to key trends in the food system such as consolidating and concentrating core value chains such as maize, wheat, poultry and dairy, with social, environmental and health impacts. In contrast to a top-down cascade imposing poverty and hunger, this perspective suggests complex feedback loops between the upstream nodes of food value chains, and the culturally conditioned agency of the poor. This exploration highlights a paucity of research on the links between the foodways of poor people and other aspects of the food system, including poverty narratives, food geographies, informality, and feedback loops in specific value chains. Innovative and trans-disciplinary research approaches and inclusive frameworks are needed to address knowledge gaps and inform transitions towards more transparent and equitable food systems.
Despite the importance of the informal food economy in fulfilling the daily and weekly food needs of a large proportion of South Africa’s low-income population, it appears little research exists on the exact nature of the relationship between the informal food economy and food security. This paper performed the first qualitative systematic review of research from South Africa that addresses both these aspects. The methods used in the review are described in detail, to increase the readers’ ability to assess the reliability of subsequent findings and analysis. Findings confirmed the low level of research focus on the informal food economy (and food security), in particular the stages of the value chain beyond the farm gate and before the consumer. Food safety research is common, although applied narrowly and with mixed findings. The conceptualisation of nutrition research is encouragingly wide, encompassing both over- and under-nutrition, but does not seem to consider the broader urban informal context in which consumers are embedded. Lastly, the research approaches used are predominately quantitative, and the voices of those who survive within the informal food economy are largely absent.