West Cape News

Steve Kretzmann

One in four South African children under five-years-old suffers from moderate or severe malnutrition, and ongoing climate change as a result of global warming is most certainly going to increase this number as food insecurity becomes more pervasive.

And while the general opinion is that ensuring greater food security is simply a matter of increasing agricultural production, it is just one factor in a complex system of food availability and access, says
University of Cape Town environmental and geographical science lecturer Gina Ziervogel.

Speaking on the first day of the three-day Climate Justice Conference organised by Project 90 x 2030 and being held at the Goedgedacht farm near Malmesbury, Ziervogel said food production was one element of food availability. Others were: market prices; import or export of food; grain reserves; and the distribution of food.

Then there was also the question of access to food, determined by factors such as social networks (an invaluable resource among the poor); income; political affiliation in some cases; and whether or not you even had transport to go buy food.

In South Africa, where about 30 percent or more of the population regularly went hungry, all these factors related to availability and access were under stress. Add the impacts of climate change on top of that, such as increasing temperature; increasingly variable precipitation; and the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events that could wreak havoc on infrastructure, damage entire crops and livelihoods, and there was the recipe for widespread hunger.

To further complicate matters, the challenge of climate change came atop other challenges such as an increasing population which was increasingly aspirational – leading to a greater demand for animal
protein which put further strain on land that could be used for food production – rising food costs, and a growing scarcity of land, water and fuel.

An increasing disease burden, illustrated by the HIV pandemic which leads to fewer productive adults able to either participate in food production or provide an income to their families to enable them to buy food, made the situation increasingly complex.

And increasing temperatures – such as an expected 1 degree Celsius mean temperature rise by 2050, meant not only that crop yields would decrease due to reduced irrigation potential and temperatures beyond
the threshold for maximum yield, but also that the shelf life of food would be shortened.

Decreased yields also lead to increased food prices, creating a positive feedback that increased food insecurity.

However, adaptation measures could, and needed to be, adopted, said Ziervogel. These included: altering cropping patterns; developing and disseminating more heat tolerant seed varieties; recycling water for irrigation; using simple moisture retaining land management practices such as mulching.

Investments also needed to be made in infrastructure to ensure bridges and roads could withstand the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events caused by global warming, such as the floods that severely
affected the Western Cape in 2008, to ensure populations are not cut off from access to markets.

When it came to policy, climate risks needed to be integrated into land management practices and planning; weather related insurance provision was required; the full cost of water needed to be calculated; and there needed to be aggressive support of water recycling and proper waste management practices.

She said considering scientists predicted that by 2080, 40 to 50 percent of all under-nourished people were expected to be living in sub-Saharan Africa and that agricultural yields were expected to decrease by as much as 50 percent by as early as 2020, the need for South Africa to develop a coherent food security policy was urgent.

Underpinned by a constitution that states that everybody has the right to sufficient food and the state has to take reasonable measures to ensure this, the government had to seriously, and directly, address the issue of food security. The first step, said Ziervogel, would be to create a high-level inter-departmental task team with a clear mandate, as we could no longer allow the question of food security, which cut across a number
of departments, to languish by default in the backroom of the agricultural department.