Thousands of people – and children – in South Africa are starving, the high unemployment rate and teenage pregnancy being contributors to acute, severe malnutrition, with 15 000 cases being admitted to hospitals in the past financial year.
Civil society groups are urging the government and the food industry to contribute equally to making at least one product label of 10 highly nutritious foods affordable to poorer households, with activists expressing concern about the growing rates of children with acute malnutrition.
“Poverty is getting worse in our communities, and we have mothers who come to the hospital twice a month because they don’t have anything to eat,” said Sunday Dlamini, a dietician at Bethesda Hospital in Jozini in KwaZulu-Natal, adding that acute malnutrition was a serious problem.
“We have high incidents of malnutrition in children under five, but we try very hard to reduce this number. We try to intervene as early as possible and are working with community healthcare workers, who go from house to house and can identify children who need help before it becomes acute malnutrition,” he told News24.
Comprising the South African Council of Churches, civil society groups and academics, last week the group endorsed a proposal by the DG Murray Trust and the Grow Great Zero-Stunting Campaign for the government and the food industry to contribute equally to making at least one product label of 10 highly nutritious foods affordable to poorer households.
Households running out of food because they cannot afford it as well as high food prices were some of the reasons driving acute malnutrition in the country.
Last month, Bongeka Buso, 38, of Tholeni village in the Eastern Cape, allegedly killed her three children before taking her life – due to starvation.
The humanitarian group Gift of the Givers revealed that the village was ravaged by poverty and unemployment.
GroundUp reported that many children in the Eastern Cape were hungry and not being fed enough at school.
Although the Department of Basic Education has a National School Nutrition Programme to provide pupils with meals, some schools said the money they received was not enough.
Sometimes, they got less than the subsidy because pupils without birth certificates were not counted in the allocation, reported the publication.
Eastern Cape education department spokesperson Malibongwe Mtima said the official allocation from the provincial department per pupil for one daily meal was R3.05 for primary schools, R3.65 for secondary schools, R7.35 for smaller schools and an additional 59c for breakfast for all schools in the 2023/24 financial year.
Mtima said schools had all received funding in accordance with the 2023/24 budget and no schools had reported being unable to feed learners because of lack of funds.
But Corene Conradie, Eastern Cape regional coordinator for Gift of the Givers, told GroundUp she recently visited a primary school near Butterworth – with about 120 pupils – receiving much less than R3.05 per child per day.
Conradie said at schools she visits across the Eastern Cape, many can only serve small portions of pap. Sometimes schools give only a spoonful of food for a meal. Gift of the Givers is inundated with calls from schools for meat and vegetable donations to supplement their meals, she added.
Research shows children who do not consume enough energy and nutrients are at risk of undernutrition, which has physical and intellectual effects.
Dr Edzani Mphaphuli, executive director at Grow Great Zero-Stunting Campaign, said some of the factors that contributed to acute malnutrition were lack of dietary diversity, poor gut health and repeated gastrointestinal infections, maternal distress, lack of parental education, poor access to clean water, and poor sanitation and hand hygiene.
"More than a quarter of children under five are nutritionally stunted,” she added. “Poor physical growth is just one manifestation of much deeper damage being done to children’s lifelong well-being, not least to their brain development.”
She said there was a need “to identify and respond to children at risk through regular monitoring of weight and height”.
“Preventing and quickly treating repeated childhood infections will also help.”
The activists have called on the food formula industry to stop extracting massive profits from the poorest mothers whose own malnutrition makes breastfeeding difficult.
With the high cost of infant formula, desperate mothers were watering down the milk to make it stretch further, meaning their babies did not get enough protein and vitamins.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
‘Rage and grief’ as children die of malnutrition, while govt punts NHI that’s likely to fail
Surging malnutrition data under-reported, say experts
DoH tells Parliament: Thousands of SA’s children have died of malnutrition
Nelson Mandela Bay: Acute malnutrition cases increase while R67m distress grant remains unspent