‘Mama is there a piece of bread?’: the plight of SA’s starving children

When asked to list their “aspirational foods”,  SA’s hungriest little children rated yoghurt, commercial cereal such as Weetbix, milk and meat at the top. Older children included mayonnaise, sauces, branded fizzy drinks and fast foods.

“Many conventional luxury foods were not listed because they simply don’t feature at all in their frame of reference,” stated the report in reference to children dependant on welfare.

These are some of the findings of a new research report into child hunger detailed in a section titled “When I Grow Up, We Won’t Be Hungry Anymore”.

The new report released by the Black Sash — a human rights organisation advocating for social justice in SA — has made a number of findings and recommendations to address child hunger.

The research team, led by Dr Chantell Witten of the University of the Free State and Dr Wanga Zembe of the SA Medical Research Council, was tasked with looking into chronic malnutrition as a long-standing public health challenge. Over 12-million children benefit from the R460 child social grant that is well below the food poverty line (set at R744,96 per person per month), and a quarter of the country’s children are stunted.

“The recent Child Gauge on food security and nutrition termed this ‘the slow violence of malnutrition against children’,”  the report stated in outlining the research terms.

The report found that preventing high rates of malnutrition starts with good nutrition and health in pregnant women, as food worries spark stress hormones that are directly linked to poor birth outcomes — leading to a recommendation of renewed efforts to ensure food security throughout the life cycle of a child.

The Children, Social Assistance and Food Security report details heartbreaking information about how the country’s poorest children are starving, and how their adult caregivers are going without food to shield children from hunger.

Because the CSG is insufficient to support a single mother and child, many caregivers are forced into difficult choices, such as choosing to buy food or pay school fees because both are not possible.

Many conventional luxury foods were not listed because they simply don’t feature at all in their frame of reference.

Another challenge identified was household health, with adults falling ill with HIV, TB or, more recently, Covid-19. This led to instances of children taking on parental roles, being placed into orphanages or exhibiting behaviours such as bed-wetting and deep anxiety over sickness and death.

One of the research participants spoke about how a scared child would watch his mother when she slept.

Another said: “He asks me: ‘Mama is there a piece of bread?’ Do you understand? That hurts me a lot.”

The CSG, identified as the most effective poverty alleviating strategy, was found to be insufficient to sustain a child for a full month. Foods such as pilchards, fruit and dried beans were unaffordable and children generally only received milk and fruit at school.

The report found that most caregivers’ grocery lists were enough to last three weeks, mostly providing only two meals a day as “there is not enough food for everyone all of the time”.

For the last week caregivers were forced into survival strategies that included borrowing money from lenders, buying food by the teaspoon at an average of R2 or R3 for milk powder and sugar, relying on starch-based diets with little diversity and adults foregoing food.

“There are some levels of starvation in some families despite the CSG, but children are generally protected,” the report found, with some of the research participants revealing how women in particular are made vulnerable to exploitation, with some mothers admitting to engaging in sex work within their local community to provide food for their children.

The researchers found that though caregivers were aware of the importance of nutrient dense foods, products such as pilchards, meat, fruit and milk were unaffordable. Grocery lists were heavily starch-based with rice, maize and potatoes featuring heavily against items such as “one butternut, one tin of baked beans and one cabbage” for a month.

One of the more striking quotes was: “Yes, I cannot buy the full school uniform for summer and winter and the food in one month. I would like to buy the healthy food that can fill up my fridge and cupboards so that my children can eat whenever they are hungry. I know that the food that makes us full is not healthy, but we are eating because we do not have other choices. I do not usually buy fruit. I have to think twice to spend R10 on fruit, since fruit is not on our grocery list. I know they get fruit and small packets of fresh milk at school. I regard fruit as a luxury. And I cook potatoes only on special days like Sundays with the braai..”

The report recommends linking the CSG to “an objective measure of need”, such as the food poverty line, and that CSG recipients be given other essential free basic services such as schooling, school transport, electricity, housing and healthcare and a subsidised food basket for families.