Journal Article

The Indelible Crisis of Urban Food Security in South Africa: A Polemic Spiel

Mukonza, Ricky Munyaradzi, Mahlatsi, Malaika Lesego Samora, Mudau, Joseph

2025

Overview

The contemporary global and African food security agenda is heavily dominated by the narrative that food insecurity is primarily a rural phenomenon. This presupposes that food insecurity is a rural predicament requiring a stupendous increase in smallholder production. This agenda is advancing despite the growing evidence in scholarly accounts of rapid urbanisation and the expansion of the likelihood of an urban future for a plethora of Africans. In the context of South Africa, the advent of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) laid bare the extent to which the country’s urban spaces are food insecure. While food insecurity is a universal challenge, in South Africa, it has particularising aspects that are rooted in colonial legacies, which include, among others, spatial and environmental injustices and urbanisation. These threats to food security interact with such factors as markets and access to credit, pricing policies and other factors to threaten food supply. This paper is qualitative in nature and uses content analyses and a combination of both the Marxist theory of conflict and the intersectionality theory as methodological insights used to obtain data. The aim is to analyse the persistent crisis of urban food security, framing it as an enduring consequence of class contradiction inherent in the post-1994 state administration. The context of its consideration is Johannesburg, South Africa. The paper found that urban food insecurity, particularly in South African townships, has increased exponentially over the years, and as a result, this has reproduced the cycle of generational poverty and disenfranchisement among the natives. The paper concludes and recommends that the panacea to urban food insecurity is the recognition of the informal economy in government policy as a key driver of food access for the urban poor.

• Publisher: Adonis & Abbey
• Subject: Class contradiction / COVID-19 / Food security / Rural orientation / Urbanisation