Food Sovereignty in the Inner City

Posted by Dineo and Emma Blog September 26, 2018

Food Sovereignty in the Inner City

Last Thursday, we visited the Wits Citizenship and Community Outreach (WCCO). Two of the interns from the Wits Food Sovereignty Centre, Courtney and Aisha, introduced us the purpose of their organisation and work on the establishment of the food sovereignty centre on the Wits University main campus in Braamfontein. This is a cooperative, which seeks not only to distribute food to the low resourced students on the campus, but to provide support for small scale farming, culturally appropriate and more ecologically produced food in the inner city. Indeed, they remind us that 14 million people in South Africa can’t afford to buy food every day at every meal. We discussed several issues about our current food system, such as the globalized agro-food complex that has increased food insecurity in South Africa. This a market-oriented system, values profit over people and is characterized by deregulation.

As a cooperative, the Wits Food Sovereignty Centre decided to take a completely different approach over food. They act in a democratic way: they share their knowledge and power. Their action fit with the food sovereignty discourse.

According to the Peoples’ Food Sovereignty Act, this is “the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and available methods, and their right to define and control their own food and agriculture systems. It is an alternative to the corporate food system.” In accordance with this definition, they grow vegetables in an ecological way, using agroecological methods of production.

We then visited the garden of Inala, a student organization also affiliated with the WCCO and advocating for food sovereignty and climate justice. They grow nutritious organic vegetables for the Wits Food Bank in a food garden on the Wits University West Campus. Students volunteer their time on Saturday mornings to tend to the garden and at the end of the day some of them enjoy the same food that they grow at the Masidleni initiative at the WCCO which provides a warm meal for students during the week at lunch times. This works to eliminate the disconnect between food, where it is produced, and the people who consume it. It encourages the ethical and environmentally aware production of food.

The South African Constitution, under Section 27(1)(b), states that, "everyone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water.” and the state is responsible for providing legislative and other means to ensure peoples' right to food. However, one of the challenges to the achievement of the objectives of food sovereignty are contained in legislature which prohibits farmers to trade or to save their seeds. Policy is showing a lack of support of small scale farmers where the compliance requirements of a small-scale farmers are the same as those of large commercial farms and this makes it harder for the small-scale farmer who isn’t producing as much as the large farms. All this highlights the need for reform in the national food system and this is what organizations such as the Wits Food Sovereignty Center, the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and Inala are striving for.