As SA’s poverty crisis deepens, the latest household affordability index report has revealed that low-income earners are paying nearly 10% more for a basic basket of staple foods than they did year ago.
Compiled by the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group (PMBEJD), it tracks food prices from 44 supermarkets and 30 butcheries in Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg and Springbok in the Northern Cape.
The index shows that the average cost of the household food basket increased by R361.14 (9.4%), from R3,856.34 in September 2020 to R4,219.48 in September 2021.
“On the average household food basket for all areas, marginal increases are shown on rice, samp, potatoes, chicken and beef offal, fish, butternut, spinach, pilchards, apples, oranges and polony.
“The cost of the core foods prioritised and bought first by a household remains a concern.
“Year on year, this basket of 17 foods, which should ordinarily be affordable and found in every home, includes maize meal, rice, flour, sugar, sugar beans, oil, bread, onions, potatoes, chicken portions, salt, stock, soup and tea.”
PMBEJD’s Mervyn Abrahams said Stats SA’s recently updated food poverty line stands at R624 per capita per month.
“The child support grant of R460 per child per month (including the emergency social relief distress R350 grant) is now 26% to 44% below the food poverty line.
“Every year our poverty indices get worse,” said Abrahams.
We have in the child support grant a proven instrument, even at low levels, to effectively improve health, well-being, education, health, social, political and economic outcomes.
— Household Affordability Index report
“The arithmetic is simple. The food poverty line is adjusted annually using the Consumer Price Index’s food inflation figures while the child support grant is adjusted seemingly as per the state’s whims.”
According to the report, the child support grant is pegged far below the actual cost required to feed a child properly.
“This suggests that the key instrument to directly support our children, and to reduce poverty and inequality in SA, is being slowly marginalised ...
“It seems we are now in danger of losing a key instrument in reducing poverty and inequality ...
“We have in the child support grant a proven instrument, even at low levels, to effectively improve health, wellbeing, education, health, social, political and economic outcomes.
“If we lose such a critical tool in the efforts to reduce poverty and inequality, we must recognise that we have nothing else on the table to replace it.”
The report explores what the adjusted food poverty lines “mean for us as ordinary citizens to make sense of a reluctant state who sees welfare as a burden to the fiscus, whose tone towards those who require assistance is really quite unacceptable, and importantly where our 12.8 million children whose lives are so tentatively held in the hands of the state may be headed”.
The report states that the child support grant was “conceived and introduced as a critical intervention to support mothers and caregivers to feed their children”.
“In doing so it was also an important justice instrument to improve equity and reduce poverty.
“In this regard it would make sense, like the food poverty line methodology, to adjust the child support grant annually by food price inflation to ensure mothers are able to feed their children properly from one year to the next.”
The report found that the annual child support grant adjustments “are not made with a view of future food price inflation, and therefore over the years we have seen the real cost of the grant decline to a level where mothers are unable to secure food for their children”.
“By not providing a properly valued grant, government will not reap the optimal benefits of improved outcomes in health, education, social stability and economic activity.
“And neither will mothers and children because without being able to secure their basic needs, the foundation needed to get out of poverty and improve their life trajectory cannot be built.”
According to the report the child support grant is an important instrument with huge benefits, even at the very low levels offered.
“We are failing our children. But we are also failing our future because child nutrition affects all our future outcomes.
“The past two years have seen huge deprivation, this on the back of several years of a food affordability crisis.”
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