HUNGER EMERGENCY: South Africa needs an emergency food plan — now

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> The question is no longer whether we have enough evidence of hunger. We do. It is whether we have enough political will to act on it.

South Africa produces enough food to feed all its people, yet millions go hungry. This is not a failure of agricultural production. It is a failure of affordability, distribution, inequality and political will.

The evidence is not abstract. It is measured in empty stomachs, children going to bed without food, parents skipping meals so their children can eat, and, increasingly, in disability and deaths, particularly in very young children.

For example, in 2022, the South African Medical Journal reported children dying from severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in the Eastern Cape . The South African Human Rights Commission subsequently found that 116 children died from SAM in that province between April 2021 and March 2022.

National health data show that more than 1,400 children died from SAM in 2023 and 2024 . In 2024 alone, more than 600 children were reported to have died from malnutrition in public health facilities. The crisis did not end there. Parliamentary data show that between May and September 2025, 206 children under five died in public hospitals with SAM as an underlying condition, alongside another 92 deaths associated with moderate acute malnutrition.

Official hospital statistics capture only deaths recorded within the health system and where malnutrition is identified as an underlying or associated condition. They therefore do not represent the full number of deaths.

Neither do they capture the exceptionally high recorded levels of wasting and stunting in children.

Research and child-health experts have long pointed to a much wider mortality burden. Estimates cited by the Union Against Hunger (UAH) and others suggest that malnutrition may contribute to about 11,000 child deaths annually.

What makes this crisis particularly indefensible is that South Africa has spent years talking about food and nutrition security while failing to establish the political machinery capable of responding with urgency. The government’s most recent National Food and Nutrition Security Plan (NFNSP) expired in 2023 .

We have spent three critical years in a policy vacuum. The Department of Agriculture’s (DoA’s) own planning documents have identified the development of a new NFNSP as a priority, alongside the establishment of a National Food and Nutrition Security Council. Yet the development of the new plan has dragged on, and the council is AWOL.

Sadly, despite the evident gravity of the hunger crisis, the state continues to behave as though the problem is waiting patiently for another policy cycle.

Food policy has become paralysed by institutional fragmentation, competing departmental mandates, inadequate coordination and an absence of political urgency. The DoA talks about production; Social Development talks about grants; Health treats malnutrition; Basic Education feeds children at school; Treasury worries about expenditure.