What surprised me most about South Africa
By Saina Shelton, SA Harvest Marketing & Communications Lead
During the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, I stayed in South Africa for an extended period. I explored its wondrous landscapes and its charming, resilient people. I discovered so much that I love about South Africa and I will always cherish it.
Sadly, this article is not a tourist review recounting South Africa’s beauty. Rather, this is a commentary on the disturbing reality about hunger and food waste and loss. It’s also about the solutions that the SA Harvest team, which I am now part of, has implemented or currently working on implementing.
SA Harvest’s mission is to end hunger in South Africa by taking a revolutionary approach, including addressing the systemic causes of hunger and leveraging innovative technology, while simultaneously tackling the immediate food security crisis through rescuing nutritious food and delivering it where it’s needed most.
First, let me take a step back. I grew up in Guyana, a small country in South America that shares multiple similarities with South Africa — some good and some not so good. The unusually friendly and kind nature of the people and the lush, magnificent landscapes are remarkably similar. On the other hand, similarities in the challenges that plague both countries — blackouts, widespread poverty, corruption, rampant food insecurity and more — evoked strong emotions and the recollection of unpleasant memories.
I vividly recall the pain endured by my family and so many others in our village and those villages nearby during a drought which caused horrific food insecurity in Guyana in the early 1990s. The crops that my family relied on for our meals literally dried up. I remember the worry in my grandmother’s eyes when she asked my uncles if there would be enough to feed her grandchildren. It was heartbreaking to witness parents sacrificing their most basic needs to ensure that their children could be sufficiently nourished with the little food they could afford to put on the table.
In the mid 90s, my family immigrated to the US. In subsequent years, during the course of getting educated, entering the workforce and volunteering with various charities, I was astounded by the high level of food insecurity and poverty that were actually prevalent in a place like New York. According to City Harvest even before the Covid 19 pandemic, “nearly 1.2 million New Yorkers were experiencing food insecurity, including one in five New York City children” and “those numbers surged during the pandemic and show no signs of receding.” Currently, “more than 1.5 million New Yorkers now experience food insecurity, including one in three children” (source).
Hunger & Malnutrition: A cyclical & violent injustice
In South Africa, the situation for millions of people is far worse than what my family went through. In fact, it is estimated that 20 to 30 million South Africans are food vulnerable with a majority of these going hungry every day. Apart from the pain and indignity of hunger, this leads to other serious social pathologies, especially those concerning children. It is estimated that “more than half of South Africa’s children continue to live below the poverty line,” and “chronic malnutrition is an underlying cause for half the childhood deaths in SA (Source).
The statistics continue to tell a tragic story even for the children who survive as 1.5 million children (1 in 3) are stunted in their growth due to hunger and malnutrition (source). Now, consider that in the context of the fact that 10 million tonnes of food is wasted every year in South Africa (source).
South Africa produces enough food to feed all of its citizens three nourishing meals a day every year, yet so much of it ends up in landfill instead of hungry bellies. It is worth mentioning here that Article 27 of the Bill of Rights in the South African constitution explicitly expresses the right of every citizen to have access to sufficient food and water, while in Article 28, it further states that every child has the right to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services” (source).
Food Loss & Waste
In school they teach that energy is never lost, it is transformed. It begs the question — what does the energy from 10 million tonnes of food transform into when it ends up in landfill? The answer is methane and other emissions that have a detrimental impact on our planet. In South Africa 90% of food waste (9 million tons) is disposed of in landfills (source). Needless to say, the nutritious food wasted in such an unnecessary manner could have provided energy to those who desperately needed it. Redirecting such waste could fill bellies and nourish bodies!
Unfortunately, good nutritious food isn’t the only thing wasted. The energy that goes into the production of this wasted food, could power the entire city of Johannesburg for 16 weeks (source). The water consumed in the production of the food that ends up in landfill could fill up 60,000 Olympic sized swimming pools (source). This is especially jarring for a country that continues to suffer from a chronic shortage of water.
Truths in our reality
Imagine trying to reconcile some of these statistics! I cannot even begin to. How did we come to accept these terrible truths in the reality of modern society? Some may claim that we have not accepted it but, rather, our inaction is because we are overwhelmed and rendered immobile by the enormity of the problem.
I believe that unless we join together as a country, as a unified community, to solve the problems in our various societies, we are all guilty, whatever the reason for our inaction.
Crafting Solutions
As is often the case, perhaps the way we see the problem is the problem and for far too long we have had a hunger crisis in so many countries, while abundant food is dumped into the garbage. Yet, we are simultaneously tackling problems like hunger and climate change in separate initiatives when these problems are obviously intimately connected in many ways, oftentimes in a causal way.
At the risk of oversimplifying, could we not address the problems of hunger and food waste as a logistics problem given the fact that there is a surplus of food? And, if solving the hunger problem boils down to a question of logistics, then it is a solvable problem with the appropriate intervention. The principle being that a problem that is systemically created can be solved through systemic intervention by civil society and/or government.
Another possible solution could be to have the South African government mirror policies that have been enacted by other governments. For example, in recent years, France has created laws that have, very successfully, compelled retailers and other businesses to donate — instead of wasting — unsold foods to organisations like food banks and other community-based organisations which feed hungry people on a daily basis. If similar policies were implemented by the South Africa government, it would help redirect food from landfill to plates, which would not only help with the hunger crisis but would simultaneously:reduce methane emissions and other negative impacts on the environment, salvage the water and energy that was put into the production of that food every year and, importantly, it would be a step in the right direction for the government to do more to fulfill its constitutional duty.
As Albert Einstein once remarked, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” Solving such a big problem will require collaboration, technological innovations, proactive interventions, and the magic of mass movements. If we are to solve the hunger crisis in South Africa and across the world, citizens have to take action and advocate for policy change by reaching out to their local representatives and having a voice. When it comes to systemic change in our food systems, we need more sustainable business practices. As consumers, we can demand that businesses commit to more sustainable food production practices in return for our brand loyalty. At home, we can be more conscious about how much food we waste and its devastating consequences.
One thing is for sure, solutions and change are desperately needed — change from this horrendous inequality and injustice that inevitably affects us all in more ways than we can imagine. Together, we can be agents for positive change, together, we can reduce food waste and loss and together, we can end hunger.
Saina Shelton grew up in Guyana. She and her family immigrated to the United States of America in the mid 90s. She was educated in New York at the State University at Stony Brook. Saina spent 12 years at Google/YouTube specializing in brand and performance marketing, content creation, and pioneering new advertising formats. She led Google’s brand strategy on YouTube including evangelizing and driving the adoption of influencer marketing, data-driven media methodologies, and innovative content creation frameworks for Google’s top brands.
Saina is an international keynote speaker, workshop facilitator and a passionate student of Archetypal Jungian psychology. She loves to travel, and is currently enjoying the natural beauty of South Africa and its amazing people while leading the marketing and communications team at SA Harvest.
