Original post at Business Daily.
In the early 1990s a new term started to circulate in the vocabularies of people trying to end world hunger: “food sovereignty”. It was invented by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, a group of farmers, landless workers and peasants whose membership now exceeds 200-million.
Food sovereignty is “the right to have rights” over the food system, a way of saying that everyone should be able to have a say about how their community, state and country ensures that no-one goes hungry.
Food sovereignty was a response to the Washington Consensus model of the 1990s. The World Bank, and the US government behind it, insisted that what mattered most was “food security”, and that people shouldn’t worry too much about how food security was achieved. If trade liberalisation and local austerity politics fed people — as they insisted it did — then one shouldn’t worry too much about the vulnerabilities and displacements that happened along the way.
A few things have happened since those debates in the 1990s.First, the proponents of food sovereignty have been proven right. Over the past decade the number and proportion of people going hungry has been rising, even though world trade continued apace. Deprivation has become so bad that over 2-billion people are now considered moderately or severely food insecure, and almost half the world’s children — 1.12-billionchildren — cannot afford a healthy diet.
In the meantime, as buzzwords will, food sovereignty has been appropriated by governments to justify militarism. Italy and France recently unveiled “food sovereignty” policies that in effect direct their militaries to control the supply chains that keep their citizens fed. The only people who have rights to have rights under this vision are the French or Italians. And, of course, Washington has stopped being in consensus with itself or the rest of the world.
Yet the core idea — that democratic control of food systems is the best way to end hunger — has only grown more urgent. Today’s food systems face a perfect storm: climate chaos, pandemic disruptions, corporate concentration and geopolitical fragmentation.
SA offers a particularly revealing case study in food system failure. Here’s a country that exports millions of tonnes of agricultural products annually while nearly a quarter of its population experiences hunger daily. Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity’s February Household Affordability Index shows that monthly food baskets in Johannesburg now costR5,324.33, having risen by R387.32 (7.8%) year on year. In Durban the situation is even worse, with baskets costingR5,370.65 after a 9.2% annual increase. The same report shows that the National Minimum Wage of R27.58 per hour provides just R4,961.16 monthly — leaving workers R363.17 short of affording even basic food needs before considering other expenses such as school fees, transport and electricity.
Drive through the maize belt of the Free State and you’ll see industrial agriculture working precisely as designed — producing commodities efficiently and feeding profits reliably — while leaving people hungry systematically. As the African Centre for Biosafety points out, three companies — Tiger Brands, Premier Foods and Pioneer Foods — make up 73% of the maize market. There is a similar concentration of ownership in retail. As the US department of agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service has shown, about five companies — Shoprite, Pick n Pay, Spar, Massmart and Woolworths — control about 80% of all formal food retail sales. This market concentration is so severe that when executives sneeze, food prices catch pneumonia.
This paradox — starvation amid surplus — reveals something fundamental about market-driven food systems, and the same story can be told of almost every economy. Food corporations excel at one thing: converting soil, water, sunlight and labour into shareholder value. Making sure that everyone has enough nutritious food is, at best, a secondary concern. That’s why herein the US 47.4-million people lived in food insecure households in2023, where seven out of the 10 worst paying jobs are in the food system, and where market concentration is increasing, leading the global trend.
In SA the Household Affordability Index spells out the human consequences with brutal clarity. In early 2025 the average cost of feeding a child adequately stands at R892.77 monthly, while the Child Support Grant provides just R520 — covering a mere 58%of minimum nutritional needs. The mathematics of hunger are inescapable: 33% of SA children under five are stunted or chronically malnourished. In a country that exports food, children go to bed hungry because their parents cannot afford to feed them.
Climate change acts as a force multiplier on these structural weaknesses. The Western Cape’s devastating 2015-2018 drought, once considered a rare anomaly, now represents the new normal— expected every 15-20 years in climate models. KwaZulu-Natal’s now regular catastrophic flooding demonstrated how quickly infrastructure can collapse, severing supply chains overnight. SA, warming at twice the global average rate, offers a preview of disruptions coming elsewhere. Again, this is a worldwide phenomenon. Down the road from me here in the US, Houston had three once-in-500-year floods between 2015-2017.
Against this bleak backdrop something remarkable is happening in communities across SA and the world. People, whether acting independently at the local level or organised into the huge shackdwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, are increasingly growing their own food. In Abahlali baseMjondolo these aren’t charity projects or hobbyist gardens — they’re democratic alternatives to corporate food systems.
This point bears emphasis: food sovereignty isn’t autarky or disconnection from global systems. It doesn’t mean growing everything locally or rejecting all trade. Rather, it insists on democratic control at appropriate scales. Some agricultural products benefit from global trade, but staples for survival should be produced with shorter, more resilient supply chains. Food sovereignty means having options beyond the false binary of corporate globalisation or nationalist isolation.
SA’s G20 presidency creates a rare opening to reframe these issues at the global level. Unlike European versions that often mask agricultural protectionism, a Global South perspective can emphasise food sovereignty as democratic participation in food system governance. The Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, started under Brazil’s G20 leadership last year, provides a foundation to build upon, with its emphasis on financing mechanisms, policy co-ordination and technology sharing.
SA’s slogan for its G20 presidency is “solidarity, equality, sustainability”. To centre food sovereignty would be to achieve a triple win — to foster the exchange of policies that build local and regional food resilience, to share best practices for spreading value along the supply chain, and to exchange ideas on how to build food systems resilient to climate shocks. There are policies ready to go: debt relief tied to food system transformation; reformed trade rules that permit strategic food reserves without penalty; support for agro-ecological knowledge networks that spread farmer innovations instead of corporate technologies; and democratised governance structures where those most affected by hunger have genuine decision-making power.
This moment of global crisis presents a false choice: either embrace corporate-driven globalisation or retreat into nationalist protectionism. Food sovereignty offers a third path —democratically controlled food systems that balance localr esilience with global solidarity. As SA confronts its own food crisis while leading the G20, it faces a historic opportunity to champion this alternative vision. The question isn’t whether wecan afford to pursue food sovereignty — it’s whether we can survive without it.