Putting Food Systems on the Climate Agenda
Producer, worker, and community priorities for Adaptation Plans under the Climate Change Act
South Africa’s food system faces deep inequalities, widespread food insecurity, precarious working conditions and severe ecological degradation. Climate change is intensifying these pressures through droughts, floods, extreme heat, changing fish stocks, production losses, disrupted supply chains and rising food prices.
These impacts are not evenly distributed. Workers, small-scale producers, fishers, informal traders, women, people with disabilities and resource-poor households face some of the greatest risks, while often having the fewest resources with which to adapt.
The Climate Change Act, which came into operation in March 2025, creates an important opportunity to address these challenges through coordinated national, sectoral, provincial and municipal adaptation planning. This position paper sets out how these plans can place food systems firmly on the climate agenda.
Centering lived experience
The paper was developed through a long-term process of capacity building and consultation with civil society and grassroots organisations representing constituencies across the food system. These included smallholder farmers, fishers, farmworkers, trade unions, informal traders, and climate and gender justice organisations.
Their experiences show that climate change is already damaging crops, livestock, fishing livelihoods, infrastructure and access to water. It is also worsening unsafe working conditions, insecure employment, hunger and the unequal burden of unpaid care work.
The paper therefore argues that adaptation cannot be limited to technical changes in agricultural production. It must address the structural conditions that make people vulnerable, including unequal access to land, water, income, public services and productive resources.
Principles for just adaptation
The paper proposes six principles to guide adaptation planning:
- realising the right to sufficient, nutritious and culturally appropriate food, while advancing food sovereignty;
- redistributing land, water, seed, income and productive resources;
- protecting and restoring ecosystems while reducing greenhouse gas emissions;
- advancing gender and intersectional justice;
- ensuring meaningful participation and the co-production of knowledge with affected constituencies; and
- strengthening government coordination, capacity, funding and accountability.
Together, these principles provide a basis for assessing adaptation measures across government departments and spheres of government.
Priorities for government action
The paper identifies five priority areas for national, sectoral, provincial and municipal adaptation plans.
First, government must protect workers through stronger labour-law enforcement, workplace climate-risk assessments, binding health and safety plans, and safe, serviced workplaces and informal trading spaces.
Second, adaptation plans must safeguard livelihoods and extend social protection. Proposed measures include progressively raising the minimum wage towards a living wage, establishing a universal basic income grant, strengthening public services, preparing healthcare systems for climate-related risks and linking skills programmes to decent employment.
Third, disaster-relief systems must rapidly restore incomes, productive assets, infrastructure and livelihoods. This requires pre-arranged funding, clear government responsibilities and accessible early-warning systems.
Fourth, government must build resilient food-production and distribution systems. Priorities include redistributing land and water, strengthening farmer-managed seed systems, supporting agroecology, protecting small-scale fishing livelihoods and investing in local food markets and supply chains.
Finally, nutritious food must be made affordable through measures including food-price controls, decentralised public food reserves, local procurement and stronger regulation of corporate concentration and profiteering.
Transforming the food system
Implementing these priorities would do more than protect the existing food system from climate shocks. It would help transform the system so that it provides secure livelihoods, distributes resources and power more equitably, restores ecosystems and guarantees access to sufficient, nutritious and culturally appropriate food for all.