The Geography of South Africa by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319949741
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

18.4 The State of Urban Food Security

Food security figures in South Africa have tended to be reported at the provincial or national level, with no disaggregation between rural and urban. This allowed the presumption of higher rural food insecurity to persist. However, a 2009 report (Altman et al. 2009, p. 354) that analysed the 2007 General Household Survey found “a very large share of seriously hungry households live in a few urban districts … Counter-intuitively, more than 30% of all seriously hungry households lived in Cape Town, Ekurhuleni and Johannesburg in 2007”. Following this, the 2012 South African National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (SANHANES) disaggregated the figures to offer insight into the locus of food insecurity. This study found that 26% of South Africans experience hunger, while an additional 28% were at risk of hunger (Shisana et al. 2013). Using the earlier dimensions of food security (FAO 1996), this means that a total of 54% of South Africans face food insecurity. When considering the SANHANES data more closely, it was reported that while 37% of respondents experiencing hunger were in the rural informal sector, 32% were in urban informal areas (Shisana et al. 2013). The highest prevalence of risk of hunger was actually in urban informal areas (36%) (Fig. 18.1).

Fig. 18.1Proportion of population experiencing food insecurity by location. (After Shisana et al. 2013)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.