CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
Nestled at the southwestern tip of South Africa, Cape Town has breathtaking natural beauty and cultural diversity. Against the iconic backdrop of Table Mountain, the city stretches along the coastline, blending modern urban landscapes with historical charm. With a population exceeding 4 million people, the city is a major economic and tourism hub, but it grapples with socio-economic challenges, including issues of inequality and informal settlements.
Cape Town is also home to a vibrant food system. While the city has seen the rapid spread of supermarkets across the city over the past few decades, local and informal food sources remain common. Among these informal food sources, urban agriculture, rural to urban food transfers and food retailers continue to play a role in the city’s urban food system. The city’s food system also faces the strain of rising inequality. As a result, Cape Town municipalities continue to face the challenge of stemming the spread of food insecurity among city residents along with the administrative challenge of integrating informal food retailers in the formal food system.
RESEARCH on CAPE TOWN
HCP REPORTS
PAPERS
Food Security and Poverty Reduction Programmes in a Cape Town Community: A Qualitative Study
Despite increased engagement with public programmes, low-income urban South African communities continue to experience high levels of food insecurity. More needs to be known about why progress in poverty alleviation and food security has plateaued (Shisana et al 2013). This discussion paper is based on a qualitative study that investigated how food insecure female-headed households in a Cape Town community made use of state (national) and local (government, NGO and community-led) poverty reduction programmes and social networks in their pursuit ...
Hunger, Anger, and Strangers: Precarious Status and Food Insecurity Among Refugees and Asylum Seekers in South Africa
This discussion paper analyzes the impact of a multiplicity of actors, policies, and practices on the food security of refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa’s urban spaces. Building on recent work that focuses on the legal production of illegality, institutionalization of precarity, and the reproduction of bordering practices by the state and citizenry, the paper reviews how South Africa’s migration governance processes coalesce with societal xenophobic tendencies to shape food security outcomes for forcibly-displaced populations. The discussion paper aims ...
Migration and Food Security in Cities of the Global South
South-South migration is an important, though poorly researched, component of the global migration regime. This discussion paper focuses on the movement of migrants from one country in the Global South to live and work in urban areas of another. While they move from one country to another for a variety of reasons and with variable outcomes, the vast majority of South-South migrants move to cities in countries of destination where employment and livelihood opportunities are greatest. The authors find that ...
Urban Food Governance Perspectives in Changing African and Southern Cities
The key urban food governance question in African and other Southern cities is understanding the role that appropriate infrastructures could play in delivering positive outcomes in the urban food system. This discussion paper looks at urban food governance needs in African cities and reflects on the governance actions required in order to respond to wider food system changes and challenges. It argues that food in the African city is a public good and discusses the role that a state (and ...
Reconceptualizing Informal Economic Governance: Implications from Cape Town, South Africa
As awareness of the centrality of informality in urban development processes in the Global South is slowly incorporated into the international development agenda, a full understanding of the myriad ways in which informal economic activity is governed has become increasingly urgent. This discussion paper seeks to address this need through an analysis of informal economic governance in Cape Town, South Africa. It first outlines a general theoretical framework for understanding the governance of informal economies that focuses on the logics ...
Governing the Informal Food Sector in Cities of the Global South
The role of the informal food sector in the urban food system cannot be appreciated or understood without the compilation and analysis of systematic and representative data on the activities of informal enterprises across a city and along food supply chains outside it. At present, there are significant gaps in the knowledge base about the character, operation, and roles of the informal food sector; a pre-requisite for sound and supportive governance. This paper presents evidence on the relative importance of ...
Social Protection and Urban Food Systems
This discussion paper examines development implications for food and nutrition when cash transfer interventions intersect with food system changes, particularly in urban areas where food is predominantly accessed through the market. South Africa is used as a case study because of its advanced social protection system as well as the rapid food system changes it is experiencing that are similar to those in other cities in the Global South. The authors consider the possible nutritional transition-related consequences for society, as ...
Food Vending and the Urban Informal Sector in Cape Town, South Africa
In South Africa, the informal food sector is either criminalized or ignored, despite the important role it plays in the economy in terms of employment, income generation, food distribution, and general livelihoods. This paper assesses the nature, operations, strategies, and challenges of the informal food sector in Cape Town. Data was collected through a survey of over 1,000 informal food vendors in the city. Survey results indicate that most of the enterprises were single-owner businesses, financed from personal savings, and ...
Food Insecurity and Alternative Food Networks in Cities of the Global South
Using the concept of Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), this discussion paper interrogates these networks and asks how they manifest in the context of food insecurity in cities of the global South. AFNs evident in Northern cities generally present a perspective of the food system that prioritises sustainability and a deep green and often local ethic, embodying aspirations of food system change. In Southern cities, food system engagement is less about engagement for change, but rather to enable food access. Traditional ...
Gender Inequality, Poverty and Urban Household Food Security in Cape Town
This discussion paper aims to advance our understanding of the gendered nature of urban household food security and how it is shaped by the relationships between internal household gender dynamics and external social factors of gender- and race-based inequalities. The manifestation of the gender inequality-food security nexus at the household level is most evident in the different food-related roles and responsibilities adopted by women and men. These differences typically centre on tasks such as growing, purchasing, and preparing food as ...
The Growth of Food Banking in Cities of the Global South
As the number and size of food banks increase globally, it is critical to research how food banks fit into existing food systems and their role in reducing food insecurity and food waste. After examining the political ecology of urban food waste in food systems, this discussion paper examines the globalization of food banking and its growth in the Global South. Through a case study of FoodForward SA, it critically analyzes the roles that urban food banks play in cities ...
Urban Food Security, Rural Bias and the Global Development Agenda
This discussion paper sets out the global, African, and South African contexts within which both urban development and food security agendas in Africa are framed. It argues that the pervasive rural bias and anti-urbanism identified in the international and regional food security agendas in the first decade of the 21st century have persisted into the second. In examining whether the last decade has brought any significant changes to the dominant discourse and its accompanying sidelining of urbanization and urban food ...
International Migration and Urban Food Security in South African Cities
The drivers of food insecurity in rapidly growing urban areas of the Global South are receiving more research and policy attention, but the precise connections between urbanization, urban food security and migration are still largely unexplored. In particular, the levels and causes of food insecurity amongst new migrants to the city have received little consideration. This is in marked contrast to the literature on the food security experience of new immigrants from the South in European and North American cities. ...
The Informal Sector’s Role in Food Security: A Missing Link in Policy Debates
This discussion paper aims to review what is currently known about the role played by the informal sector in general, and informal retailers in particular, in the accessibility of food in South Africa. The review seeks to identify policy-relevant research gaps. Drawing on Statistics South Africa data, we show that the informal sector is an important source of employment, dominated by informal trade with the sale of food a significant subsector within this trade. We then turn our attention to ...
Mapping the Informal Food Economy in Cape Town, South Africa
The informal food retail sector is an important component of urban food systems and plays a vital role in ensuring access to food by the urban poor. Yet, policy frameworks both to address food security and to govern the informal sector neglect informal retail in the food system and, as a result, the sector is poorly understood. This discussion paper argues that it is essential to understand the dynamics of the informal food retail sector, which is diverse in terms ...
Urban Food Deserts and Climate Change in African Cities
The underlying assumption in much of the Euro-American food deserts literature is that urban food deserts are dynamic spaces, expanding and contracting with the advent and withdrawal of supermarkets. This discussion paper argues that to tie such dynamism purely to the spatial behaviour of formal food retail outlets is both narrow and inappropriate in the African context, where the use of the food deserts concept requires a sophisticated understanding of the multiple market and non-market food sources, of the spatial ...
Hungry Cities of the Global South
The recent inclusion of an urban Sustainable Development Goal in the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda represents an important acknowledgement of the reality of global urbanization and the many social, economic, infrastructural and political challenges posed by the human transition to a predomi- nantly urban world. However, while the SDG provides goals for housing, transportation, land use, cultural heritage and disaster risk prevention, food is not mentioned at all. This discussion paper aims to correct this unfortunate omission by reviewing the ...
POLICY BRIEFS
An Urban Perspective on Food Security in the Global South
The global food security policy community should reorient its actions on food security in the Global South to consider the urban food consumer. Since it is currently working with value chains in rural areas, we recommend that this view is extended into urban areas. Specifically, global and multilateral actors and national and local governments need to prioritize an urban food security agenda by engaging in and strengthening intra-urban value chains. This will have the dual result of lowering prices and ...
The SDGs, Food Security and Urbanization in the Global South
As governments develop policies to achieve SDG 2 in rapidly urbanizing countries, the need to pay particular attention to the role of the informal economy, non-food issues, pro-poor pricing structures and healthy food consumption patterns will increase. The case studies in Mexico, China, Kenya and India have highlighted important food security challenges facing urban dwellers and how to overcome them by targeting existing food systems such as supermarkets, the informal economy and PDSs. While local context will dictate the best ...
BOOK CHAPTER
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THESES
Xenophobic Citizenship, Unsettling Space, and Constraining Borders: Assembling Refugee Exclusion in South Africa’s Everyday
— PhD Thesis — This dissertation investigates how myriad actors, including the state, citizens, civil society, refugees, and the media, intersect to shape refugee experiences in urban centers in South Africa. Building on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on refugee lived experiences in this context to determine the ...
A Solidarity (Food) Purchase Group in Cape Town
- Master Thesis - For the past thirty years, food producers and consumers have initiated alternative food networks (AFNs) because of the perception that the globalising agrifood system is unsustainable, untrustworthy, and untransparent. These alternative strategies for food production and distribution are perceived to be rooted in sustainable, socially-embedded principles. ...
Putting Food onto the Urban Agenda: How the City of Cape Town can Increase Access to Sustainable and Healthy Diets Through Urban Food Governance
- Master Thesis - Rapid population growth, rising urbanisation, globalisation and technological progress have fundamentally changed how we produce and consume food. The majority of urban diets are now dominated by low intakes of fruit and vegetables and high intakes of highly processed, energy-dense and nutritionally poor foods. In Cape ...
Organised Social Networks and the Positive Resettlement of Female Forced Migrants: A Case Study of the Scalabrini Women’s Platform and Congolese Women in Cape Town
- Master Thesis - This research assesses the potential of organised social networks to improve the resettlement of female forced migrants in their destination country. It looks more specifically at the impact of the Scalabrini women’s platform on women from the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) experience in the city ...
Rethinking Resilient Urban Food Systems: Vulnerability to Food Insecurity as a Consequence of Drought – the Case of Cape Town
- Master Thesis - The current rapid global urbanisation makes achieving food secure cities a growing challenge, sharpened by the connected and worsening issues of inequality and climate change. Economic shifts towards concentrated and corporate food systems are thought to increase the vulnerability of cities to climate related risks. The ...
A Tale of Two Sea Points: Gentrification, Supermarkets and Food Security for Lower-Income Residents
- Master Thesis - This research is founded on the argument that food systems are (and should be) a core mandate for urban planners, particularly as food is connected to many other functions relevant for built-environment professionals. To date, city officials and built-environment professionals in South Africa have adopted a ...
Planning for Urban Food Security: Leveraging the Contribution of Informal Trade in the Case of Bellville Station Precinct
- Master Thesis - South African cities, similarly to other cities across the Global South, experience high levels of food insecurity. Urban food insecurity is particularly prevalent in low income households, with 72% of households in low-income urban areas in Cape Town identified as food insecure in a 2013 African ...
Sustainable Urban Agriculture: A Sustainable Adaptation Strategy for the City of Cape Town?
- Master Thesis - This work explores the narratives associated with the benefits of sustainable urban agriculture areas in terms of adaptation to climate change in the Cape Town Metropolitan Area, South Africa. Urbanization and climate change are stressing urban areas in developing countries. Therefore, finding a development path towards ...
The Relationship Between Urban Food Security, Supermarket Expansion and Urban Planning and Policy in the City of Cape Town: A Case of the Langa Junction Mini Mall
- Master Thesis - For many years, urban food insecurity has been ‘invisible’ to urban planners and policy makers. This is due to the misconception of food insecurity as being primarily a rural issue and attributable to a lack of supply of food; however, it is clear that the issue ...
Food Security and Poverty Reduction Programmes: The Experience of Female Headed Households in a Cape Town Community
- Master Thesis - Living in impoverished urban areas, female headed households are most vulnerable to food insecurity. In order to reduce the risk and abate the experience of household food insecurity, civil society (NGO) and government have established numerous poverty reduction programmes and initiatives. However, in spite of ongoing ...
Food System Governance for Urban Sustainability in the Global South
- PhD Thesis - Food security remains a persistent global challenge. Food security is defined as a situation where all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. ...
JOURNAL ARTICLES
The Owners of Xenophobia: Zimbabwean Informal Enterprise and Xenophobic Violence in South Africa
This paper is a contribution to our understanding of the intertwined economic and political crises in Zimbabwe and the crisis of xenophobia in South Africa. There have been few studies to date specifically examining the impact of xenophobic violence on Zimbabweans trying to make a living in the South African informal economy. The paper first provides a picture of Zimbabwean migrant entrepreneurship using survey data from a 2015 study of migrants in the informal economy. All of the Zimbabwean entrepreneurs ...
Hungry Cities: A Critical Review of Urban Food Security Research in Sub-Saharan African Cities
There has been renewed interest in the issue of food in cities in sub-Saharan Africa. A similar renewal has been noted in the North American and European contexts. However, the political, practical, and ideological starting points of these research endeavors are quite different. This paper presents a historical and political lens through which the trajectories of urban food research in sub-Saharan African can be understood. It begins with a historical analysis of the field and uses this to explain why ...