October 16 marked World Food Day, commemorating the founding of the UN Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 1945. Across the world this day offers an opportunity for countries to assess their food security and efforts to boost agricultural production.
One of the measures used to evaluate the state of a country’s food security relative to the rest of the world is The Economist’s global food security index. SA now ranks 59 out of 113 countries, an improvement from 70th in 2021. This positions the country as the most food secure in Africa, followed by Tunisia at 62.
SA’s food security score came in at 61.4, from 57.8 in 2021, a commendable improvement. The increased score shows that SA’s progress in the index is not merely because other countries have regressed. The Russia-Ukraine war had the effect of increasing global food prices, but there has also been an actual improvement in SA’s underlying conditions.
The index has four subindices: food affordability, food availability, food quality and safety, and sustainability and adaptation. The affordability and availability subindices carry a combined weighting of two-thirds of the total index. The affordability subindex includes the change in average food costs, agricultural trade, food safety net programmes and funding for food safety net programmes. The availability subindex includes sufficiency of supply, agricultural infrastructure, and political and social barriers to food.
In 2022 SA experienced a mild, seven-point deterioration in the food affordability subindex. Meanwhile, the rest of the subindices improved significantly. This decline in the affordability subindex is unsurprising as the country has experienced a broad acceleration in consumer food price inflation since the start of the year.
SA’s food inflation averaged 8% year on year in the first eight months of 2022, from 6.5% over the same period in 2021. Still, it is worth emphasising that this challenge speaks to the rising cost of food in an environment of generally high unemployment.
Notably, the rise in food prices is a global phenomenon and not unique to SA. The dryness in South America, which negatively affected crops in the 2021/2022 production season, combined with growing demand for oilseeds and grains in China, higher shipping costs and the Russia-Ukraine war, have underpinned a global surge in food inflation. This in turn lifted prices in SA, despite large domestic agricultural harvests in the past three seasons.
Global food prices have actually come off the levels we saw in the months immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine. For example, in September the FAO global food price index was down 1% from the previous month. This marked the sixth consecutive monthly decline and was underpinned by drops in the prices of vegetable oils, sugar, meat and dairy products.
This means food affordability has improved internationally from the third quarter of the year. Still, current price levels are higher than in 2021. For example, the index is still 6% up from September 2021. Another point to emphasise is that food prices were already elevated in 2021 due to disruptions to supply chains, drought in South America and increased demand for grains in China, among other factors.
A major issue to keep in mind when observing global agricultural indices is that subjectivity can never be fully eliminated from the authors’ judgment. Resource constraints can hinder objective data collection on the ground in each country, and they sometimes rely on blueprint models that might not be site specific. Sources of bias can stem from inconsistency in data quality, frequency and reliability across all countries. The weightings and rankings are also tricky because they must be tailored to suit different socioeconomic contexts.
South Africa's food security conditions
However, the key message remains that SA is in a better place regarding food security and is leading the continent. This does not mean there should be complacency. SA will need to continue improving food security through expanding agricultural production and job creation in various sectors of the economy. At a technical level, the ideas of expanding agriculture and agro-processing capacity to boost growth and job creation were well established as far back as in National Development Plan in 2012. They were again highlighted in the 2019 National Treasury paper and, most recently, in the 2022 Agriculture & Agro-processing Master Plan.
These include expanding agricultural activity in the former homelands and on government land, enhancing government commodity organisations’ partnerships in extension services, investment in the network industries (water, electricity and road infrastructure), port infrastructure and state laboratories. Some interventions are more regulation focused and therefore do not require capital spending by the government, though these still need institutional capacity building.
Such regulatory interventions include modernising regulations such as the Fertilisers, Farm Feeds, Seeds & Remedies Act of 1947, with which many role players in agriculture continue to express dissatisfaction. The Agricultural Product Standards Act’s enforcement to ensure the department of agriculture, land reform & rural development leads the implementation and does not assign it to third parties is another critical intervention that could be explored.
Regionally, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape, the least food secure provinces, also have the most underutilised land. These provinces should be a priority in agricultural development plans. With a commercial focus where conditions permit, agriculture improvement would help job creation and household food security in SA.
• Sihlobo is chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber of SA and author of ‘Finding Common Ground: Land, Equity, and Agriculture’.
