Nine million South Africans went hungry in 2025, and more than one in five households could not put adequate food on the table. Those figures, drawn from Statistics South Africa’s General Household Survey and cited by Maverick Citizen managing editor Zukiswa Pikoli, opened Daily Maverick’s webinar Hungry in a Land Of Plenty: What SA’s Food Plan got Wrong, held on 29 October. She paired them with another stark measure of the country’s food crisis: stunting affects 27% of children, and in the first nine months of 2020 more than 450 children under the age of five died in public hospitals with malnutrition as an underlying condition.
For the people behind those numbers, the question the webinar posed was a simple one. Why does a country with a plan to guarantee food security still have so many going without?
The plan in question, the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan (NFNSP), was designed to tackle exactly these problems, from food insecurity to child stunting and malnutrition. But as Pikoli told the webinar, the plan lapsed in 2023, was largely unfunded, and its coordinating council never met. Its replacement, meanwhile, remains in draft form, uncosted and without a budget.
The origins of the NFNSP stretch back to 2012, explained Hettie Schönfeldt, co-director of the ARUA Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems at the University of Pretoria, who contributed to the plan. It was developed by the former Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, together with the Department of Social Development, the Department of Health, the Department of Basic Education and the Presidency, with input from research organisations and universities. The ambition, she said, was considerable. The execution was not. Because there was no clear budget or implementation plan, the departments responsible for delivering it simply carried on with business as usual.
For Busiso Moyo, co-founder of the Union Against Hunger (UAH), that business-as-usual approach is no longer tenable as South Africa approaches its fourth year without state leadership on the lapsed plan. Civil society was excluded from the creation of the first iteration of the NFNSP, he noted, yet it has been calling for food democracy and the realisation of the right to sufficient and nutritious food under section 27 of the Constitution. “The government forged ahead with the development of the previous policy under some kind of veil of secrecy,” he said. In response to that exclusion, organisations like UAH are now actively seeking to engage with the drafted NFNSP and to make their grievances about the previous plan heard.
The consequences of that earlier failure are still visible in the policy pipeline. Moyo pointed to policy paralysis as a barrier to any roadmap for the country, citing the Food Security Bill as an example. It was tabled as far back as 2001, yet remained unapproved and still under discussion in 2026.
There are, however, signs of movement. Schönfeldt noted that the draft Food Security Bill is open for public comment through the NFNSP public consultations, which have been held in districts across every province since September. The draft plan differs from its predecessor in ways that speak directly to citizens’ daily lives. Municipalities will receive a clear mandate, built into their integrated development plans. A monitoring, evaluation, learning and impact assessment framework will continuously track targets for 2029, 2033 and 2037, assessing whether people are actually benefiting from the systems the plan creates. And the plan will build on existing programmes people already rely on, such as South Africa’s social grants. The Maternal Support Grant is to be implemented to address child stunting and nutrition during the first 1,000 days of life, complementing the Child Support Grant, which is only accessed later in a child’s life.
Civil society is organising to shape that draft. Moyo said UAH held workshops with civil society before the nationwide consultations began, to develop the priority areas it believes the new plan should address. From those workshops, UAH concluded that the plan should prioritise childhood and maternal nutrition, land and agrarian reform and, above all, food affordability.
One gap remains conspicuous. While government is trying to engage with civil society’s concerns, Moyo said, part of the challenge is private sector engagement. The private sector, which should also be held accountable for creating a nourishing food system and which the plan will address, has not been present during the consultations.
Asked how government could ensure the private sector acts in a way that protects children’s nutrition, Schönfeldt suggested expanding the list of zero-rated foods to include proteins such as chicken and meat, broadening its nutritional value. She also argued that the private sector should treat nutrition as a field for innovation, asking why no retailer has, for example, sold affordable food baskets based on the food-based dietary guidelines for children.
“Innovation should take place. To say, ‘how can we constantly have a biodiverse diet available where people are?’ And that is a call to everyone, to all of society, not only to the corporate, but also to local groups to support them,” she said.
With consultations running across every province since September, the question now is whether the draft plan will be funded, costed and opened to the voices it once left out, before another year of hunger passes.