19/10/2024
Food Security | South Africa’s biggest retailer, Shoprite, has published its inaugural Food Security Index for 2024, showing that the country’s food security levels are at their lowest point since 2012.
According to Shoprite, the concept of ‘food security’ was first defined at the 1996 World Food Summit, defined as a situation “where all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for a healthy life”.
For its index, developed by economists from the University of Stellenbosch, the group looked at a more specific definition:
A country can be said to have food security when there is enough food in a country, its population has economic and physical access to food (it can purchase food and access it physically at convenient locations), there is sufficient diversity in the diet of its population, and there are not periodic dips or deterioration in these dimensions, and they are stable over time.
The Index evaluates four dimensions of food security, namely availability, access, utilisation and overall stability, from 2012 to 2023, and creates a baseline to measure food security in South Africa yearly using publicly available and annually updated data.
While South Africa peaked at 64.9 on the Index in 2019, this number dropped to 45.3 in 2023 (zero indicates severe food insecurity).
“It means that, on average, more South Africans experienced greater or deeper food insecurity in 2023, compared to any other year between 2012 and 2023,” the group said.
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https://businesstech.co.za/news/lifestyle/795794/shoprite-food-security-warning-for-south-africa/
IMAGE: Royalty free picture. Supermarket. Used for illustration.
