South Africa’s history filled with ironies: Our ports were a centre for slavery, yet in 1834, we ended the practice 30 years before the US did. Our great moment of infamy as a nation was the introduction of apartheid, which we manage to end in 1994 with a peaceful transition, and we now are one of the most democratic countries in Africa.We ran a poll recently on whether it is possible to eradicate hunger in South Africa in our lifetime, and only 40% of people thought it was possible. As the Lunch Gang, we hope to increase this percentage, and we will start with bringing up another irony of South Africa: the fact that we are a country that produces enough food to feed all its people. We have enough already!
Each year, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) produces a study of what each country produces (you can see our full country profile here ). While the study is fairly in depth, this is what South Africa produces per person per day:
 600 g of starchy foods
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 300 g of fruit & vegetables
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 150g of meat and fish
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For those of you who follow the news, you may have heard that last year we went from being a net exporter of food to becoming a net importer, so you may rightly be a bit sceptical of the above production figures. However, we are a net importer only in monetary terms, not in agricultural outputs. A closer look at our imports and exports shows we export a large amount of unprocessed food with a high food value per dollar or rand, and in return purchase a smaller amount of processed food with far less food value per dollar or rand. An example of this is sugar and rice: We export large amounts of unrefined sugar with a high kilojoule content per dollar, and in return import rice mostly in a milled and polished state, which has a lower kilojoule content per dollar. Really what we are doing is selling our agricultural produce unrefined to the export market, and paying a premium to get processed food from the import market.
We also waste large quantities of food – in fact, about 20% of food is wasted in the supply chain from producer to consumer. We’ll talk more about this in tomorrow’s blog, where we look at the different ways good food is wasted.
So the greatest irony is that in a country that produces enough food, we still have as much as 30% of our population going hungry. That’s over 14 million people. However, over the next few days, we hope to convince you that it is an irony that we can find a solution to, much as we did with slavery and apartheid. And to keep you thinking about this, here is a great quotation for our most famous South African:
"Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." - Nelson Mandela
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