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.
The deaths have continued.
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. Trade and Industry considers markets and competition.
And sadly, hunger falls between them all.
Although the Deputy President is supposedly the chair of the Food Council, it hasn’t met, and no single institution appears to have sufficient political authority to say: this is an emergency and the state must act accordingly.
basic nutrition is a political question
But if this were not bad enough, it’s about to get worse. Experts now talk about the inevitability of a global food crisis next year, due to a combination of war and the impact of the El Niño weather event on food production worldwide. Even if big agriculture in South Africa is prepared for a summer of delayed and diminished rainfall and extreme heat, as claimed by Wandile Sihlobo, small farmers and poor consumers are not.
Although food profiteer Shoprite claims food prices are at their lowest in years (!), that is not the experience of people who buy food, as documented month after month by the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Project. Read their latest report on food price movements in July 2026.
Factor into this the rising costs of fuel, electricity and, for many, the cost of water as water systems break down across the country.
Waiting until food prices spike (again) and harvests fail is not disaster management. It is disaster exacerbation.
Millions of people already cannot afford to eat. More than a quarter of households are moderately food insecure, and almost one in five are severely food insecure (HSRC, 2023). Only around 36.5% of households are fully food secure.
We cannot continue responding to this crisis by telling poor households to grow vegetables in their back yards. Most South Africans buy their food, and if food prices are rising faster than grants and wages, then the food system is failing regardless of how many people are encouraged to plant spinach.
After several years of delay, the government is suddenly working on a new NFNSP. Suddenly there is a flurry of superficial public consultation. The emerging NFNSP is being positioned as a long-term response to all dimensions of food security. A worthy objective, but a 10-year plan cannot be an excuse for further postponing immediate action.
If the new NFNSP begins only in mid-2027, it will be budgeted for only in FY 2028. And if the NFNSP is inadequately funded, it will repeat the failures of the last one.
As usual, the problem is that there is a gap between policy and power, between commitments and budgets, between promises and implementation. That is why we argue the new NFNSP must be accompanied by something it currently lacks: a sense of emergency.
South Africa needs an Emergency Food Plan
The UAH is therefore calling for the development and immediate implementation of a “12-month Emergency Food Plan”. This should not replace the NFNSP, but it should fill the gap between the emergency we face today and the longer-term architecture of food and nutrition security that the government is attempting to build with the NFNSP.
An Emergency Food Plan should have a clear budget, clear responsibilities and measurable outcomes. It should immediately address the things that are killing and impoverishing people now:
And finally, dear leaders, don’t make us fight for an emergency plan. Section 27 of the Constitution says that “everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water”. Section 28 recognises every child’s immediate right to basic nutrition. These are not aspirational statements. They are binding constitutional duties.
The language of “food insecurity” can sometimes make hunger sound technical and bureaucratic. But hunger is not an abstraction. Hunger is a political condition. It is produced by the maldistribution of income, land, markets, infrastructure, power and opportunity. And when children die because they did not have enough food, we should be asking not only what went wrong in the clinic, but what went wrong in the economy, the food system and the state.
South Africa does not need another year of meetings before acting. It does not need to wait for the perfect institutional arrangement. It does not need another decade in which responsibility is dispersed across departments while nobody is ultimately accountable.
And, as local government elections get closer, with most political parties still silent on the invisible hunger that seeps through our communities, government certainly does not need to tell hungry people to wait patiently for the next plan. Malnutrition and starvation in a modern food system should haunt our politics.
The question is therefore no longer whether we have enough evidence of hunger. We do. It is whether we have enough political will to act on it.
We call for an Emergency Food Plan to be developed before World Food Day on 16 October, backed by money, authority, targets and accountability. Yes, we need the long-term NFNSP, but we also need immediate action to stop people going hungry while government coordinates plans for the future.
South Africa must stop time-wasting around hunger and start acting against it. The future cannot be built on the graves of children who were hungry today. DM
Mark Heywood and Busiso Moyo are co-founders of the Union Against Hunger.
