CAPE TOWN - The national lockdown made the lack of food security among poorer communities worse and the government will this week provide details of further action to provide food to vulnerable and destitute people who cannot afford to buy food, President Cylril Ramaphosa said yesterday.
Over the past three weeks there have been distressing images of people clamouring for food parcels at distribution centres and of community protests against food shortages.
Many non-government organisations did, very early in the lockdown, warn about the impact of the lockdown on already fragile food security among vulnerable communities.
The South African Food Sovereignty Campaign said yesterday that South Africa is facing a food crisis of about 30 million people, and the Solidarity Fund’s responses to the problem had so far been inadequate.
“The Solidarity Fund has centralised resourcing and three weeks into the lock down it has not been able to effectively ensure food supply, through food parcels. The food crisis is going to persist as long as we have the Covid-19 pandemic,”
Many large companies have also, in their Covid-19 relief responses, included food parcels among their measures.
On Saturday, a meeting of the President’s Coordinating Council (PCC) said 100 000 households had been provided with food parcels since the start of the lockdown and that further households would be targeted through the Solidarity Fund and Department of Social Development’s Disaster Relief Fund.
The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) had also set aside more than R400 million for social relief of distress through food parcels and vouchers to be rolled out on a larger scale.
The Solidarity Fund, which has R2.3 billion for Covid-19 relief measures funded by citizens, corporates and foundations, said on Friday that it had “started the roll out” of food parcels to more than 250 000 families across South Africa, after it had made R120 million available for food relief.
“We have in just over a week planned and are executing a food distribution intervention on an enormous scale,” the Fund said.
As an example of the many companies that were providing food relief, Sappi said yesterday it had entered in a partnership with the Southern Lodestar Foundation and Spar Group, to distribute nutritional porridge to rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga.
Sappi would use its knowledge and access to rural networks to distribute some 60 000 kilograms of A+ instant porridge, using the networks provided by community health workers.
The Southern Lodestar Foundation provides innovative nutrition solutions for children and has developed the instant porridge which is being used in school breakfast programmes. and is renowned for its nutritional value consisting of protein and other micronutrients.
Ubank, together with Mineworkers Investment Company (MIC) have joined forces to support government to combat Covid-19 through a R2m contribution, R1m of which would go to the Solidarity Fund and another R1m would be dedicated to support current and former mine workers and their families negatively impacted by current circumstances with food parcels, said Ubank chairman Keshan Pillay.