High-profile food discussions disconnected from realities

MARQUEE events like the UN’S Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) grab the headlines and get experts’ tongues wagging, but there’s little confidence they make any difference to everyday food concerns.

The special rapporteurs appointed by the Human Rights Council to report on the summit, held last month, have said as much.

The panel of three independent experts bewailed the lack of substantive discussion on the impact of Covid19 on food systems and food security and the often harmful grip that big transnational food corporates have on global food systems.

The issues were echoed this week during a webinar hosted to mark World Food Day. The “Food Dialogues”, a series of panel discussions and short video interviews were hosted by the South African Urban Food and Farming Trust, the University of the Western Cape (UWC) Centre of Excellence for Food Security (COE-FS) and other stakeholders.

Just as at the UNFSS, discussions on the food system and food insecurity tend to be intimidating, noted Nomonde Buthelezi, the co-founder of the group Food Agency Cape Town (Fact).

In addition, the events are often held exclusively at the expert and scholarly level, and also tend to overlook local concerns.

“It was missing an African voice. It was missing a local voice,” said Buthelezi of the UNFSS.

Her perspective was that such conversations tended to be more about people like her – small urban farmers operating in disadvantaged communities – but not with them.

In addition, the events were often held exclusively at the expert and scholarly level, and also tended to overlook local concerns.

The issue of small-scale farmers, informal producers and informal vendors vying for a place in a food system in which “Big Food” calls the shots took up a large part of the discussion at the panel, moderated by Professor Julian May, the director of the COE-FS.

It’s increasingly recognised that small-scale producers and vendors in the informal sector play key roles in urban food systems in South Africa and the rest of Africa. Not only do they produce and sell their goods within their communities, making access to food more convenient, but they often do so at more affordable prices than supermarket chains.

But, as demonstrated during lockdowns throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, it was those in the informal sector who were shut down. At the same time, commercial farmers and supermarkets could keep their doors open and operations running by virtue of their status as essential industries.

This hints at the bias in food systems towards formalised “Big Food” companies, agreed the panellists.

“Small-scale actors play such a big role in moving food, in producing food, and also in consuming food,” said Solophina Nekesa of ICLEI Africa.

“But when it comes to policy and high-level documents, they are not being mentioned.”

A reason for that was that there was a serious gap in data on informal enterprises like urban farmers and urban gardening, explained Jane Battersby from the University of Cape Town. As a result, urban agricultural land was valued in such a way that again favoured big commercial producers.

However, that data was lacking in the first place, largely because urban agriculture was viewed more as a livelihood strategy than a generator of economic value. It was taken as a given that “real” and economically viable food production took place “elsewhere”, outside the city, said Battersby.

“It’s partly around how we envisage the food system and what are we valuing.you measure according to what you value, and so you can make decisions according to the data that you’ve got.”

In cautioning against a “romantic” notion of food systems, Jean-paul

Adam, of the UN Economic Commission for Africa took a different line, however.

First, the Covid-19 pandemic had exposed the weaknesses in food governance in Africa, he said. But, he insisted, in seeking to curb growing food insecurity in Africa while coping with the impact of climate change, large commercial food production would nonetheless continue to expand.

In addition, it would attract more investment as countries worked to improve infrastructure and efficiencies in their food systems. Likewise, multinational supermarket chains would become even more established and dominant across Africa, he said.

But that needn’t be entirely at the expense of small producers, Adam argued. There could – and should – be a place for them if the right precautions and policy decisions were taken.

“The question we need to ask ourselves is how do we define the space in a way whereby those more corporate systems are nonetheless creating opportunities for local producers and that there is involvement in the value chain,” he said.