A Better Food Future For SA

Current methods of food production threaten the environment and human health, and change is thus urgently required in South Africa’s food system. In a report, recently published by the WWF-SA, titled ‘Agri-food Systems: Facts and Futures: How South Africa can produce 50% more by 2050’, the organisation’s senior manager of the policy and futures unit, Tatjana von Bormann, details the changes needed to achieve a better food future for the country.

- Tatjana von Bormann

"In the past few decades, millions of people across the world have been lifted out of poverty. This has led to a rapid growth in the middle class, particularly in developing economies, with resultant lifestyle changes. These macro-trends are expected to continue to 2050, when a projected global population of more than nine billion will need to be fed through a food system that right now is fraught with challenges. These include accelerating climate change, rising input costs, ecosystem and resource degradation, shifting dietary preferences, social inequality, and resource constraints and conflicts.

Population and income growth, which are inevitably linked to a more resource-intensive diet and greater waste, intersect with environmental challenges to add further stressors within the fixed limits of planetary boundaries. Given these multiple drivers, food security cannot be understood in isolation; it has economic, social and environmental implications, and must be viewed within the framework of the intersecting resources of land, biodiversity, water and energy.

A complex system

In recent years, an effort to understand the boundaries and complexity of wide-reaching food systems has replaced the conventional thinking of food production that results from a simple, linear process supply chain. In this expanded understanding, all the components involved in the production, processing, distribution, consumption and waste of food, need to be considered.

The complex food system landscape is particularly evident in developing economies within the Southern African region. The ability of the already fragmented and underdeveloped food systems in Southern Africa to meet the needs of a growing population with rising income levels will be further compromised as the effects of climate change become more pronounced.