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Abstract
This was written in the 4th week of South Africa’s lockdown period, when the country
had 3465 reported Covid-19 cases and 58 deaths. It was also the week in which looting
of formal and informal retailers, food trucks and distributors of food parcels began.
South Africa has been widely lauded for its swift and decisive Covid-19 action. A
National State of Disaster was announced when we had just 61 cases, and lockdown announced
when we had 1170 cases and one death—the result of concerns about the impacts of the
virus in a country with dense informal settlements, poor access to water, a weak public
health sector and high levels of TB, HIV, hypertension and malnutrition.
However, the State’s attempts to “flatten the curve” include a set of regulations
that demonstrate limited understanding of how the poor access food and an ongoing
bias towards large scale, formal food system actors.
Our research has found consistently higher levels of food insecurity than official
statistics present. Our work also indicates how poor households depend on a range
of formal and informal food retail sources to meet their food needs. The informal
sector provides food in affordable unit sizes, provides food on credit, sells fresh
produce at lower costs than supermarket fresh produce and sells prepared foods appropriate
for households that experience income, time, storage and energy poverty (Battersby
et al. 2016).
And yet, when the lockdown measures were first announced the President said that the
only food retailers that could open were supermarkets. The official lockdown regulations
were expanded to include spaza shops1 (Minister of COGTA 2020). However, confusion
about what permitting was required for spazas to operate and the Minister of Small
Business Development’s later retracted statement that only South African stores would
be able to operate meant that law enforcement forced many legitimately open spazas
to close. Foreign owned spazas (about 80% of all spazas) have been most targeted (Githahu
2020).
Only after two weeks of lockdown were informal food vendors allowed to start selling
again, and only those selling uncooked foods with existing municipal permits. Most
township vendors had previously operated without permits, and were therefore now unable
to legally operate under lockdown. While the State had previously often turned a blind
eye, law enforcement officers have now been forcefully closing down these businesses.
In the fourth week of lockdown, the State finally announced support for spazas. However,
amongst the exclusionary conditions to obtain this relief are registration with the
South African Revenue Service and South African citizenship (DSBD 2020).
The government’s lockdown regulations have demonstrated considerable bias towards
the large-scale formal actors and pushed towards formalization of the informal sector
through the conditions about who is able to operate and the conditions placed on relief
measures. These reflect historical biases against informality, the Africa-wide modernization
agenda and the power of large scale food businesses to self-identify as partners-in-development
(Battersby 2017).
While there have been many hopeful statements that the food system will transform
positively post-Covid-19, the South African case suggests that in a state of crisis,
governments with wilfully poor understandings of the food systems of the masses will
develop regulatory responses that will rather lead to further consolidation of the
food system rather than usher in potentially transformed food systems.
is an Associate Professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town.
Her research focusses on urban food security and food systems in African cities. She
has particular interests in the role of spatial planning in shaping food environments
and local and global food systems governance discourses and practices.
Journal
Journal ID (nlm-ta): Agric Human Values
Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Agric Human Values
Title:
Agriculture and Human Values
Publisher:
Springer Netherlands
(Dordrecht
)
ISSN
(Print):
0889-048X
ISSN
(Electronic):
1572-8366
Publication date
(Electronic):
11
May
2020
Pages: 1-2
Affiliations
GRID grid.7836.a, ISNI 0000 0004 1937 1151, African Centre for Cities, , University of Cape Town, ; Cape Town, South Africa
This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research
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Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.