Millions of South Africans struggled to afford sufficient and nutritious food despite the country’s extensive agricultural and food-processing capacity. Food unaffordability reflected not only changing commodity prices, but also low incomes, unemployment, market concentration, unequal value chains, and weaknesses in public policy.

The IEJ, the DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security at the University of Pretoria, and the Just Transitions Network co-hosted a two-day symposium on food prices and affordability in South Africa.

The symposium brought together representatives from national and local government, labour, civil society, academia, research institutions, the private sector, and the informal food economy. Participants examined the scale and drivers of food unaffordability, including price formation across food value chains, corporate concentration, household incomes, energy and transport costs, climate pressures, trade, and geopolitical instability.

Discussions moved from diagnosing the crisis to considering practical interventions, including stronger competition enforcement, improved price transparency and market monitoring, strategic food reserves, local processing, crop diversification, public provisioning, and a more coherent national food-affordability policy.