NARNIA BOHLER-MULLER | Food insecurity exposes gaps in SA’s social safety net

Hungeris not only a shortage of food. That is what it looks like from the outside and what our policy language has taught us to see: a gap between calories required and calories delivered, closable by a better grant or a fuller plate. But chronic, structural hunger is something else.

It is the foreclosure of abecoming,meaning the closing-down of a future the self was entitled to grow into. The isiZulu wordngisazophumelela— I am still becoming; I am still going to succeed — carries in its grammar one small, stubborn word:still. Hunger negates thestill.

And because the self is formed within a web of care, structural hunger does not merely weaken a body. It tears the relational web through which personhood is constituted. This is what I mean byflourishing denied: not only a material harm, but also a constitutional and an ontological one.

[paywall]

The scale of the denial is a matter of public record. The Human Sciences Research Council’s recentFood and Nutrition Security Survey(2024) finds 63.5% of South African households food insecure, and 17.5% severely so. “Hunger is not a private misfortune that befalls the poor.

It is a wound in the common life.” — Prof Narnia Bohler-Muller These figures are not the residue of a crisis passing through. They are the ordinary, annual output of the arrangements we have made, which is why the language of emergency, with its implication of exception, flatters us. Our constitution knows this.

Section 27(1)(b) guarantees everyone the right of access to sufficient food and water; Section 27(2) then qualifies the guarantee by “progressive realisation” within the state’s “available resources”. Section 28(1)(c), the child’s right to basic nutrition, carries no such qualification. For the child, the constitution names a threshold owed not at the horizon of fiscal convenience butnow.

Lawyers are trained to read that asymmetry as a drafting quirk. I read it as a confession. It is the constitutional text conceding, in the case of the child, precisely what our courts have as yet failed to concede: an immediately owed minimum below which the self cannot form.

[/paywall]