January 13, 2021
We have enough food in SA to feed everyone
SOUTH Africa produces enough food to feed all its people. Farmers, agri processing plants, food manufacturers, retailers, warehousing and logistics companies, food distributors, and thousands of other businesses that operate in the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry, all typically generate huge amounts of ‘waste’. Since most of this food, if intercepted in time, is good for human consumption, we prefer to refer to this as surplus food. This food becomes surplus because of inherent weaknesses throughout the consumer goods value chain.
South Africa has a net surplus of food as a country – yet food poverty at the household level is widening, and now even more rapidly so because the pandemic is decimating our economy and jobs at an alarming rate. About one third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. Approximately 50% of this food loss takes place during harvesting. Processing, packaging, dist