The Portfolio Committee on Social Development this week expressed dissatisfaction with the Department of Social Development’s food and nutrition security programme, which is tasked with providing nutritious food to vulnerable households and individuals. The Department was presenting to the Committee in Parliament its annual performance and strategic plans for the 2017/18 financial year.
Committee members expressed concern about the large amounts of money spent on this programme, when it does not appear to be assisting the communities and individuals it is set up to serve.
Committee Chairperson Ms Zoleka Capa told the Department that the Committee still wants to engage broadly in a different platform on this issue. “We have expressed our dissatisfaction with how this issue of people and food is going to be done. Because the Department cannot behave as if it is far removed from the people and come with a finished product and say this is how we are going to do things. You can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to different areas and places,” she said.
Ms Capa also expressed concern about the manner in which the Department is seeking solutions to this challenge. “Let us develop activism, rather than a desktop arrangement that you think is the best solution. We need to convert our thinking in this regard. Otherwise there will be billions of rands poured in, but there will be no programme and no success at all,” she said.
“The rate of stuntedness and poverty will remain. Children will be unable to learn, because from the mother’s womb they will not be fed. We have been saying: hands-on from three months pregnancy to 1 000 days, but we are not doing it. People are still having pregnancies with anaemia and they still have malnourished children.”
Ms Capa’s sentiments were echoed by another member of the Committee, Ms Karen Jooste, who proposed that the Department should rather look at increasing the social grant so that people can afford to buy nutritious food themselves.
“Regarding the programme of food and nutrition security, we have a very big problem. We have a 25 percent stunting rate in this country, so you cannot speak about equal opportunities if you have a stunting rate. It renders it null and void. Instead of having this problem, is it not more strategic and effective just to increase the grants? Because people know what nutritious food is, they know where to buy it. The problem is they just don’t have the money. So why then not just increase the money, rather than have a programme that clearly is not working?” Ms Jooste said.
Faith Kwaza
4 May 2017
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