The 2008 Food Summit: A political response to the food price crisis in Gauteng province, South Africa

Abstract

In responding to food price riots and other unrest in 2008, Gauteng province in South Africa hosted a two-day Food Summit attended by 4000 delegates. Summit invitees expected to be consulted on issues of concern about food prices, but the government instead responded with the message that the poor must be self-sufficient and grow their own food (via the Ilima/Letsema campaign launch), an impractical suggestion in a crisis. The timing of the 2008 Summit in relation to major changes within the African National Congress and the looming 2009 national election in South Africa leads to a conclusion that the Summit was a political event designed to build political capital ahead of the elections, rather than a genuine stakeholder consultation event linked to food security. Findings of this study indicated that food security planning in Gauteng is exclusionary through its rural bias and excludes, for example, urban dwellers and foreign migrants. Also, at that time, Gauteng would have been underprepared for a genuine food emergency as there was no working provincial strategy to deal with urban food security or a severe food crisis.

Keywords:

• food price crisis 2008
• Gauteng Food Summit
• Ilima/Letsema campaign
• rural bias
• urban poverty

1. Introduction

This paper probes the Gauteng 2008 Food Summit (held 10–11 July 2008 at Gallagher Estate conference venue, Midrand) and the associated launch of the Ilima/Letsema agricultural campaign in Gauteng province, South Africa, and evaluates the Summit's legacy by reviewing material in the public domain, including press releases, government speeches and media coverage. The 2008 Food Summit in Gauteng was attended by 4000 provincial citizens, many bussed in, as well as an impressive list of provincial and national government leaders, political parties, trade unions and the non-governmental organisation sector, which set the tone for the Summit as a significant political event.

In the public domain are a single press release (Republic of South Africa, 2008a) and the text of three government speeches at or about the Food Summit (Republic of South Africa, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d), an article by a SangoNet reporter (Seokama, 2008), and several articles in the Mail and Guardian (Staff Reporter, 2008; Williams, 2008). This study also includes a scan of provincial policies on food security. Academic articles were also sought to provide insights into food insecurity as a topical global and local issue of concern, as well as into the aims of the South African government with regard to land and food security. The overall intention of this study was to understand whether the summit was a genuine attempt to address the food price issue and inform policy – or was a politically opportunistic event designed to calm an ‘angry populace’ at a time of crisis and thereby create political capital ahead of the 2009 national election.

1.1 Food insecurity as a global conflict multiplier

High food prices are one of the main causes of food insecurity and food emergencies as the poor find themselves unable to buy the food they need. In recent years there have been fluctuations in global food prices, but in the 2007/08 global food price unprecedented increases sent the ominous message that the world's poor could no longer be fed with affordable food and that the hunger of the poor would spill over into violence (World Bank, 2008, 2011a, 2011b; FANRPAN, 2009; Kamara et al., 2009:1-3; Crush & Frayne, 2011). Protests around the world and in certain African and Asian countries led to the ‘Arab Spring’ events (Asian Development Bank, 2011; Schneider, 2008).

Food security is now seen as the central global development challenge for the twenty-first century (Crush & Frayne, 2011:528). Bar-Yam et al. (2013) show in detail how food prices in South Africa are strongly associated with observed periods of extreme public violence (xenophobia, mining-sector strikes) consistent with the view that when people are unable to feed themselves and their families, desperation leads to social unrest. Bar-Yam et al. (2013:1) also warn that ‘governments and companies should track and mitigate the impact of high and volatile food prices on citizens and employees’.

That rising food prices disproportionately affect the urban poor rather than the rural poor is never fully acknowledged by government planners, specifically those within the South African Development Community (Crush & Frayne, 2011:528).

1.2 Food security in South Africa

Following the 1996 World Food Summit, the South African government embraced the Rome Declaration and ‘addressing the multiple layers of food insecurity in the country’ (Koch, 2011). Despite many indicators of food production being positive and South Africa's national ‘food-secure’ status, about 14% of the population is vulnerable to food insecurity and 25% of children under the age of six have had their development stunted by malnutrition (Koch, 2011). The early post-1994 South African Reconstruction and Development Plan acknowledges that poverty and food insecurity are the ‘legacy of the apartheid socio-economic and political order’ (Koch, 2011:4, citing the national Integrated Food Security Strategy, IFSS, 2002), and if the causes were political and linked to racial exclusion then it would seem defensible that the ‘solutions’ today should also be linked to current socio-political order and transformation imperatives, dealing with issues of the poor and marginalised.

1.3 Gauteng in 2008: An unstable province

Gauteng was ‘unstable’ during 2008 with xenophobic violence and service delivery protests in urban areas. In May 2008, the then premier of Gauteng province, Mbhazima Shilowa, reviewed the need for declaration of a State of Emergency (Shilowa, 2008; Shoba, 2011), which would be the first for the new democratic government. Shilowa decided that the situation, although dire, could be handled without resorting to such an extreme. There was also political turmoil within the ruling African National Congress (ANC) ahead of the 2009 national elections and linked to plans to depose President Thabo Mbeki (Pillay, 2008:9). Finally, there was trade union-led mass mobilisation linked to the high food prices (Staff Reporter, 2008).

Thus in Gauteng, an ANC stronghold, it was likely to have been important that the Gauteng provincial government be seen to act swiftly and decisively to reassure the ‘anxious populace’ that the volatile situation was under control. There were even some suggestions that the xenophobic violence of 2008 was intended to destabilise the 2009 elections (Nyar, 2010:4), and perhaps there were similar fears about the 2008 food price protests.

The 2008 Gauteng Food Summit was thus held, ‘acknowledging the seriousness of the current situation’ relating to the global food price crisis in general (Republic of South Africa, 2008d).

1.4 The rural constituency of the ANC

The dominance of land as a source of wealth in African economies makes land policy (and linked agriculture and rural development policies) especially politically sensitive and potent. The South African government largely equates ‘poverty’ with ‘rural poverty’ and continues to promote agricultural projects despite a growing major national trend of urbanisation (Crush & Frayne, 2011:528).

The ANC is often accused of being ‘backward looking’ and constantly seeking to remind constituents of historical elements of both traditional, pre-colonial black society (a rural past) and the ‘struggle’ to assert legitimacy. Pillay (2008) adds that ‘the ANC as a liberation movement has forged certain traditions which it claims are an integral part of its identity. One of these is “grassroots driven mandates”’. All of this makes sense politically because the main historical, political constituency of the ANC is largely poor and significantly rural (Pillay, 2008) and not the urban masses. One of the elements of this current study was to probe the rural bias of food security planning, even in an urban province like Gauteng. It would seem that food security planning is linked to ongoing attempts of the ANC to link to these ‘grassroots driven mandates’ – and voters.

1.5 Consultation and policy

The South African government has been criticised for its lack of depth in public consultation in many cases, both in policy development and relating to service delivery issues. Pillay (2008:9), quoting the Deputy General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, Jeremy Cronin, adds that: ‘the structures of the bureaucracy remain hostile to public participation and pressure … and increasingly policy is formed by directors general of government departments and their senior management … ’. These statements could be applied to the style in which provincial government ‘consulted’ at the 2008 Gauteng Food Summit. Although the Summit was seemingly ‘about dialogue’ (Republic of South Africa, 2008c), senior government officials used a top-down approach to launch a pre-developed rural campaign. The records of stakeholder ‘dialogue’ at the Summit no longer exist (Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development [GDARD] Communications official, personal communication, 2011), making it seem that the government did not take enough care to preserve them.

2. Food security planning perspectives in South Africa

Post-apartheid agricultural and food security policies, including the National Integrated Food Security Strategy 2002, aim to address the adverse legacy of apartheid (Koch, 2011).

2.1 Food security planning for Gauteng

At the time of the 2008 Gauteng Summit, a suite of well-crafted rural development and agriculture strategies and programmes already existed within the Gauteng provincial government, including the Gauteng Rural Development Strategy and the Gauteng Agricultural Development Strategy (GADS, 2006). It should not have been necessary to implement a new programme like the Ilima/Letsema campaign.

Once can quickly observe that in both existing provincial food and agricultural strategies and the Ilima/Letsema campaign, those without access to land may find themselves not fully catered for in terms of planning.

2.2 The Ilima/Letsema agricultural campaign

The national Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries encourages household food production through backyard gardens and programmes such as the Household Food Security and Ilima/Letsema campaign. The Ilima/Letsema urges communities to ‘plough, plant and produce their own food’ (Republic of South Africa, 2009, 2011). In practical terms, this campaign does usefully distribute agricultural advice and agricultural starter-packs to poor households and supports small-scale farmers (Republic of South Africa, 2011). It is not overtly about the redistribution of land.

2.3 Black Economic Empowerment in agriculture

Agriculture Black Economic Empowerment (AgriBEE) also demonstrates a complicated rural bias. With the adoption of AgriBEE by the Department of Trade and Industry in February 2008 (Republic of South Africa, 2008d), the political head of the Gauteng Department of Agriculture and Rural Development's Letsema/Ilima War on Poverty campaign reaffirmed that this agricultural campaign is intended to promote the objectives of the AgriBee charter. In line with the Charter, the GDARD states that it ‘recognises farm-workers and farm tenants as designated groups that should benefit from the development of the entire agricultural sector’ (Republic of South Africa, 2008d). Individually and in collaboration with other government departments, the GDARD undertakes to ensure that the ‘benefits accruing to these communities are implemented’ (Republic of South Africa, 2008d). In other words, these are not politically neutral campaigns.

While farm-workers and farm tenants should indeed be first in line to benefit from any opportunities within agriculture in the province, it would appear that urban people are firmly left out of ‘designated groups’ by this statement, thus affirming the government's ‘rural bias’ in planning.

2.4 Urban food insecurity

While rural poverty and food insecurity is understood as a reality, urban food insecurity is seen as an ‘invisible crisis’ in the urban domain in that it affects individuals and households, who, because they are not organised, are invisible to government (Crush & Frayne, 2011). That rising food prices disproportionately affects the urban poor, rather than the rural poor, is never fully acknowledged by governments, specifically those within the South African Development Community (Crush & Frayne, 2011). In urban areas, these ‘communities’ can be more difficult to distinguish, particularly if they are living in inner-city environments, for example. This would also mean that ‘voters and non-voters’ may not be clearly apparent.

Yet governments must pay closer attention to addressing the food security (and other) needs of this invisible urban segment of the poor (Crush & Frayne, 2011:530). Political uprisings can spring from this segment as urban discontent increases locally and around the world. Also, what is seldom acknowledged in government planning, according to Crush and Frayne, is that cash, and not agriculture, is the main source of food security in South Africa, in both rural and urban localities (Crush & Frayne, 2011). A key method to combat food insecurity is through people having paid work.

3. Gauteng demographics

3.1 Gauteng as an urban province

In 2008, Gauteng has the largest share (21.5%) of the South African population and approximately 10.5 million people lived in this province in 2008 (Stats SA, 2008:3).

Gauteng is predominantly an urban province with densely populated informal urban settlements on the periphery of the formal residential areas, crowded inner-city settlements, as well as peri-urban areas that are more sparsely populated (Gauteng Social Development Strategy, 2006). While Stats SA reported that in 2006 the South African population as a whole is around 44% rural, Gauteng's population is 4% rural (which should be 420 000 individuals, based on 10.5 million people in total), with 96% being urban (Provincial Profile Gauteng, 2004). The urban dwellers, whether in informal settlements, townships or high-rise slum apartments in the inner cities, are generally unable to produce (grow) food themselves and must buy food. Food security planning by government recognises the lack of land in urban areas to some extent through making government land (school yards, clinic grounds) available for household and schoolyard food garden projects (GIFSS, 2009).

To unpack available rural statistics for Gauteng, Punt et al. (2005) states that in Gauteng around 117 430 households (3.8% of 3.7 million households) are involved in some agricultural activities, mostly ‘home production for household consumption’, but not actual commercial farming. Around 88 141 individuals or 13.6% of the Gauteng population earn some share of their income from wages of household members working in agricultural-related industries (Punt et al., 2005), but not from independent farming. About 68 801 individuals in Gauteng (out of a population of around 10.5 million) are classified as agricultural workers, loosely defined as skilled agriculture workers and/or people working in the agricultural industry, either in an informal or formal capacity, and reporting positive wage or salary for the year 2000. This figure represents 2.4% of Gauteng's workforce (PERO, 2009:51).

Agriculture in all its forms is the smallest economic sector in the province, at 0.4% of provincial gross domestic product (PERO, 2009:31). In 2009, agriculture contributed 2% to the province's employment, while manufacturing contributed 17%, government and services 24% and wholesale and retail 23%, amongst others (PERO, 2009:51). It is possible that the government's stance on rural development in Gauteng represents a determination to create a new farming reality, and not a vision of the current situation.

4. Study findings

4.1 The terminology of the Gauteng Summit

The World Food Summit and its Declaration on World Food Security (13–17 November 1996) (Rome Declaration, 1996) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 2008 Summit may have provided the precedent for the Gauteng 2008 Food Summit, including the terminology used in the Gauteng Food Summit and the promised, but never written, ‘Summit Declaration’. By using Rome terminology, the expectation was created by government that high-level food security issues would be tackled and that public consultations would help coordinate a comprehensive response to the spiralling cost of food. An expectation was created amongst attendees that the Gauteng Food Summit was an event of some importance – enough to attract 4000 delegates.

4.2 Summit outcomes and legacy

It is clear from the 2008 Gauteng Food Summit that, while there were speeches, presentations, breakaway groups and discussions, government did not formally record these discussions in a way that preserved them for future reference. Actual stakeholder issues appear to have been marginalised and supplanted by the roll-out of the politically linked Ilima/Letsema rural agricultural campaign at the Summit. This raises a suspicion that the Gauteng government did not intend internalising stakeholder issues at the Summit as it already had a ‘solution’ to present – the Ilima/Letsema rural agricultural campaign.

In 2011 a GDARD communications official stated that the Summit Declaration was never written (government communication official, personal communication, 2011). Thus a formal record of stakeholder–government consultations during the Summit does not exist for researchers (or stakeholders) to analyse.

One of the Summit resolutions was to:

establish a high level provincial committee, comprised of food processors, farmers, organised labour, consumer bodies, wholesalers and representatives from Gauteng provincial government, municipalities and NGOs to engage all the role players to find short and long term solutions to the food crisis. (Seokama, 2008; Republic of South Africa, 2008a)

It is difficult now, using online resources, to determine whether this committee was established.

A new Food Security Strategy was drafted in 2009 (GIFSS, 2009). GIFSS (2009) was a poorly crafted document that made no reference to the 2008 Summit (or stakeholder concerns), made many sweeping and emotive political statements, and as such represents non-evidence-based planning because there are no academic or provincial source material cited. GIFSS (2009) is no longer located on the GDARD website.

4.3 Funding Ilima/Letsema in Gauteng

To fund the provincial Ilima/Letsema campaign, the national government Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries made additional funding available in the 2009/10 budget year and for future years within the Medium Term Expenditure Framework to Gauteng for the roll-out of the Letsema/Ilima campaign. This public investment could have funded the up-scaled implementation of a suite of existing food and agriculture-related strategies, which perhaps lacked political charisma.

4.4 Using the 2008 Summit to build political capital

The 2008 Gauteng Food Summit gives all appearances of being an ANC electioneering event, linked backwards to the Polokwane 2007 ANC Summit and forwards to the 2009 national elections. Adding to this perception, at the Gauteng Food Summit, MEC Mosunkutu states that ‘when we met in Polokwane in December 2007, we took resolutions, one of those was on economic transformation of the country’ (Republic of South Africa, 2008c), locating the ‘we’ firmly within the ANC camp, and excluding others.

It would seem that provincial government wanted to be seen to be firmly in control and able to offer a ‘solution’ (like the Ilima/Letsema) to the populace – and thus use the ‘solution’ to create political capital.

The Ilima/Letsema campaign appears to have been spontaneously presented as a ‘government gift’ to the ‘troubled’ populace of Gauteng. This ‘gift’ was specifically offered to the politically important rural poor, who, even though they are a small proportion of the province's poor, are reliable ANC voters. The ‘gift’ largely excludes the urban poor who lack access to significant land holdings and who, in any case, may be hostile to the ANC (foreigners, whites, and/or the educated middle class).

4.5 Ilima/Letsema and a rural call

The Ilima/Letsema campaign launched at the Summit was also linked to the highly politicised AgriBEE campaign and to the transformation of agriculture and the land (Republic of South Africa, 2008b). Once again, it can be noted that Ilima/Letsema is not a neutral campaign. Also, while the Ilima/Letsema campaign does have a valuable element of fostering the productive use of land and stimulating agrarian reform, the emotive language surrounding the campaign hints at added political capital creation; for example, exploiting the emotive value linked to transforming land ownership and ‘decolonising the landscape’.

The use of emotive language to call people to action may indeed be useful to motivate rural or peri-urban people to begin cultivation (or voting), but this type of language may have a different, unsettling effect in an urban area where there is a shortage of land, perhaps creating unanticipated consequences. At best, rousing language in an urban setting could lead to useful schoolyard gardens and community food gardens and the increased use of fallow or underutilised peri-urban land, but at worst could spur violent land invasions. The Ilima/Letsema agricultural campaign is thus of little use, if not dangerous, in an acute urban food crisis. In 2008, evoking a ‘return to the land’ in urban Gauteng did not cause a heightened demand for land, perhaps as Summit attendees understood this message as a mere slogan linked to the 2009 election.

5. Discussion and conclusion

An analysis of the 2008 Food Summit shows that the government's response to the 2008 food crisis was largely that of political opportunism, rather than a genuine desire to consult and solve food security problems. Other national governments, by comparison, offered protesting civilians food parcels, tax cuts and reductions in fuel prices (Schneider, 2008), while the Gauteng government was cautious in what it offered. A Food Summit was held, mimicking the 1996 Rome Food Summit, yet with only superficial consultation and the launch of ‘pre-packaged’ Ilima/Letsema rural agricultural campaign that was offered as a ‘gift’ to the electorate ahead of the 2009 election.

Perhaps unwisely, the key message at the Summit was to urge Gauteng's poor to ‘go out and grow their own food’ – yet to urge the poor to grow their own food is an insensitive and impractical approach in an urban province like Gauteng where the poor have little access to land, agricultural know-how or inputs. The suggestion that the urban poor somehow grow their own food should have had the poor of the province rising up in greater anger, but they did not.

During a period of uncertainty, perhaps the Summit did ‘calm the populace’ and the violence-linked food price crisis in the province subsided, although food prices have settled at a new high level and it is almost certain that the world will not see inexpensive food again in the short to medium term. The 2009 South African national election was held peacefully. Yet dealing with food insecurity or possible food emergencies should not be seized upon as a political opportunity by government, but should be based on sound, stakeholder consultations and evidence-based planning.

The 2008 Summit gave a strong indication that the Gauteng provincial government is more politically comfortable engaging with a rural populace on rural poverty issues than confronting the hostile urban poor. In South Africa, the rural populace is known to be the ANC's stronghold of voters and it would seem that this small (4%) rural component in Gauteng is very important politically. It appears that political capital can be still be made by invoking ‘romantic’ rural notions and a ‘return to the land’ – and very little to be made by focusing on tough, unglamorous urban issues.

The ANC is thus out of step with modern realities, namely urbanisation trends of the early twenty-first century. However, in fairness, it must be acknowledge that if poverty and food insecurity are viewed as the ‘legacy of the apartheid socioeconomic and political order’ (Koch, 2011, citing the National Integrated Food Security Strategy 2002), and if the causes were political and linked to racial exclusion, it would seem acceptable to seek solutions that are also likely to be political and linked to social transformation. Yet in a severe food emergency (famine situation), food would have to be made available in an unbiased manner, as per Human Rights Watch, which emphasises that international aid should not be based on any factor other than need (Human Rights Watch, 2003).

A key finding of this investigation was that in 2008 Gauteng province was under-prepared for an acute food emergency situation. In 2008, Gauteng was not embracing the issue of urban poverty and food insecurity, which is more potent as an unrest accelerator than distant rural poverty, and was ‘lucky’ that the crisis subsided peacefully as food prices righted themselves, albeit to a new level. Gauteng province needs to consider future food emergencies more strategically and prepare for worst-case scenarios. While South Africa is not a country at risk from famine according to the Famine and Early Warning Network (FEWS NET, n.d.) famines have occurred in the distant past (South Africa had three official famines during the period 1912–46) (Koch, 2011) and civil unrest can itself trigger cause food emergency situations as seen in the North of Africa.

While the global food prices and protests subsided in late 2008, the United Nations FAO reported in early 2011 that food prices had again increased, reaching their highest level since the United Nations agency began measuring them in 1990, a situation of grave concern (Asian Development Bank, 2011:6; FAO, 2011). Also, in 2012, the drought in the USA and widespread crop failures have again warned of food shortages and high food prices (Meyer et al., 2012). Meyer et al. (2012) also mention that the surge in prices has ‘revived memories of the 2007/08 food crisis when the high cost of food triggered riots in more than 30 countries from Bangladesh to Haiti’. The problem of food insecurity has therefore not gone away, and may be escalating.

Finally, what is of concern is that Gauteng government's current planning for food security is divisive and excludes those who are urban and those who are not of the African National Congress (e.g. foreign nationals and those representing the interests of commercial farmers). The major global trend of urbanisation, with the United Nations predicting that over the next 30 years almost all of the expected three billion increase in the human population will be in cities, including African cities, seems to be ignored by Gauteng's provincial planners. In a province (or rather, a future city region) that may have 15 million people by 2020, a more holistic, non-political, evidence-based and inclusive planning mechanism must be in place soon, catering for the urban food-insecure, for future food emergencies, and particularly those linked to worst-case outcomes of climate change.