Food poverty, hunger and household production in rural Eastern Cape households

ABSTRACT

More than two decades since the advent of democracy in South Africa, the place of small-scale agriculture in rural development, poverty alleviation and food security remains ambiguous and highly contested. However, there is now some new evidence that official income poverty estimates in South Africa may be underestimating the contribution of rural, land-based livelihoods when measuring household well-being. This paper aims to explore this possibility further by identifying how household production activities are associated with improved food security among rural Eastern Cape households in the former homelands. The analysis is based on data from Statistics South Africa’s 2008/9 Living Conditions Survey and its annual General Household Surveys. In adopting a food poverty lens, the findings suggest that hunger levels are lower among farming households in the Eastern Cape even though a higher percentage of these households (relative to non-farming households) live below the national food poverty line. The paper concludes by discussing some implications for policy.

KEYWORDS:

• Food security
• poverty
• agriculture

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank John Reynolds for comments on an earlier version of this paper. The ideas, opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper remain strictly those of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Crucially, this proposed strategy also hinges on a greater level of state intervention in the commercial agricultural sector together with improved wages and a higher union density in the sector.

2 The Eastern Cape is the province with the second highest percentage of African households reporting agricultural activities (38%) and is home to roughly 22% of the 2.4 million African households in South Africa which are involved in some type of agriculture (own calculations from the 2012 General Household Survey).

3 Household participation in agricultural activities is derived from Q4.5–4.6 in the GHSs and by combining Q13.1 and Q23.1 in the LCS.

4 Acute hunger is defined as any adult/child in the household often or always going hungry because there was not enough food at any point in the past 12 months.

5 The poverty line used in the table is based on Statistics South Africa’s official upper bound poverty line of R577 (in 2009 prices). This poverty line is, by far, the most commonly used of the official national poverty lines and the poverty statistics which are cited in the academic and popular literatures are generally based on this threshold.

6 It is difficult to reconcile this large and somewhat unexpected discrepancy in the measure of hunger. While this requires further investigation, for now, I wish only to highlight it as a possible limitation to the way that subjective measures can be compared across different survey instruments.

7 This is not likely to be a causal relationship. In other words, households are not likely to be poor because they farm—rather households that are poor may choose to farm as a way of coping or diversifying their livelihood activities (see also von Fintel and Pienaar 2014).

8 Households suffering medium hunger levels reported that either an adult or child experienced hunger ‘sometimes, often or always’ over the past 12 months. Expanded hunger levels are those in which a household member reported hunger ‘seldom, sometimes, often or always’ over the past 12 months.

9 I also use a wider definition of hunger than Pienaar and von Fintel (2014) in that I combine adult and child hunger into a single binary outcome variable and identify households that ‘sometimes’ experience hunger as being food insecure.

10 NB: Only 1% of all African households that engage in agriculture in South Africa report that they farm as the main source of income in their household and only 5.5% supplement their household incomes with farm earnings (own calculations).

Additional information

Funding

This work was done with the support of a grant awarded to the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) from the REDI 3 × 3 project on “Employment/Unemployment, Income Distribution and Inclusive Growth”. The REDI 3 × 3 projects is funded by the South African National Treasury via the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU).