Daily Maverick has been tracking the prices of 14 food items since 2022 in a simulation of what a person who receives only the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant as an income would be able to purchase.
Food inflation has been cooling since November 2023, keeping between 5% and 6%. The effect of this may be countered by rising costs in other areas such as transport, electricity prices and rents, which also affect supermarkets, which in turn shift some of their operational costs to the price point of their goods.
Food price inflation is the change in the price of a basket of food over time.
The Household Affordability Index report’s data shows an easing in the annual rate of inflation of Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity’s (PMBEJD) food basket at 5.1% year-on-year.
May’s report reads: “Whilst the rate of inflation is coming down, it is important to note that inflation on food is still 5.1% higher now in May 2024 than it was a year ago. Further, the rand-value cost of the basket (this month at R5,330.30) is still very high in comparison with the low baseline wage of the National Minimum Wage (this month at R4,633.44). It means that whilst the overall inflation is coming down, the majority of South Africans, earning low wages, still face a severe affordability crisis, meaning that they are unable to buy the proper nutritious food their families require.”
While conversations brew about whether the SRD grant can become a more permanent fixture, increasing it to R750 to match the current food poverty line, a filmmaker has released a documentary on the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of people in need, owing to the algorithm used to qualify applications online.
Duduetsang Mokoele said the documentary shows how a broken and opaque AI system is preventing South Africa’s most vulnerable communities from receiving the social security benefits they desperately need.
“Mind the People is a short documentary about South Africans living at the extreme poverty line ($1.33 USD per person per day) and their maddening, heartbreaking encounters with the state’s welfare algorithm. Millions of South Africans rely on the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) to afford food, soap, electricity, school supplies and other necessities. Sassa programmes like the R370 SRD grant are increasingly administered by algorithms – algorithms that are failing citizens,” Mokoele said.
Mokoele reveals how the SRD algorithm routinely and mysteriously declines qualified recipients, and the near-impossible task of seeking an appeal or accountability, because the whole process is online with limited alternative means of appealing. Mokoele highlights other variables such as the platform and algorithm being in English only, which can be challenging to speakers of indigenous languages.
The struggle to receive the grant consistently has devastating effects for individuals without an income – which make up a substantial portion of the South African population, with unemployment inching higher in the first quarter of the year to 32.9% from 32.1%.
The PMBEJD’s Basic Nutritional Food Basket is an attempt to track the cost of foods required for balanced nutrition outside of the basic basket of 44 items. “[Namely] the foods and the cost of these foods for families to ensure their health and nutrition and for children to grow and develop properly. The basket was designed in consultation with a registered dietician Philippa Barnard,” the report reads.
“The Basic Nutritional Food Basket is an index on which we can start talking realistically about the cost of nutritious food, and the inadequacies of low wages and social grants.”
The report explains that it is important that current food expenditure patterns that are severely constrained by affordability are not conflated with the food expenditure required to secure proper nutrition. DM
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