URBAN NUTRITION: Jane Battersby, SA’s champion for urban food systems

Award-winning geographer and Associate Professor Jane Battersby loves the alchemy of flour, water, salt and yeast creating bread. And slathering butter on it. She has a serious ick with eggs — despite eggs being a good source of protein and relatively affordable. 

Battersby works in urban food security and food systems in Africa. Her move was entirely unplanned, she told Daily Maverick. At the end of her postdoc her boss suggested the African Food Security Urban Network (Afsun), which was trying to get a sense of what food insecurity looked like in African cities. The story had always been that it was a rural issue, Battersby explained. She was not interested at first, because she thought it was all about farming. 

Supermarkets were rapidly expanding into lower income areas, and the perception was that this would make for more affordable, safer, healthier options. But people continued buying from informal traders. The patterns of who buys from where, and why, sparked her interest. 

They found a very low uptake of urban agriculture. 

“That had been the kind of dominant conversation about how we were going to address food security. And so if it wasn’t showing up in our data, even though there was this policy interest, this NGO interest, what’s going on there?”

She began to link questions around spatial inequalities, access to resources, and culture and identity she had worked in before as a geographer, to urban food security.

She has been the Cape Town partner of Afsun since 2008.

Battersby has been involved in numerous projects. The Nourished Child Project and the Living Off-Grid Food and Infrastructure Project both looked at what shapes the way we eat. 

The questions on infrastructure (such as access to water and sanitation, or electricity) and how this shaped food habits and security were critical. If we did not address that, she said, the conversation would “remain about accessibility, and accessibility is often reduced to food prices”.

Hunger is an urban issue  

What would be the most important policy instrument the country could implement to solve food insecurity in our cities?

“Any would be good,” she said.   

South Africa still tended to imagine a rural context and set of challenges. However, there were shifts to recognise urban food insecurity in the revised National Food and Nutrition Security Plan, she added. 

“We found globally 76% of the world’s food insecure live in urban and peri-urban areas. And yet, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s flagship report – the State of Food Insecurity Report – still presents food insecurity as being predominantly a rural problem, which then shapes the global narrative on food security,” Battersby said, referring to the Committee on World Food Security’s High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition report.

South Africa was more than 60% urban. There was a focus on small-scale agriculture as the solution to food security, she said. But when you have an urban population – what does this really mean? 

“There’s a failure to recognise the extent that local government in particular actually plays a role in shaping food systems and the conditions that make food systems operate.”

The right to the city 

Linking the right to food (a constitutional right) with the right to the city (more of a concept) shifted the discourse, she explained. 

“Policy initiatives should uphold the right to food and other human rights, such as the right to life, health, water, education and adequate housing, which in the urban context can be articulated under ensuring the right to the city,” outlined the UN report she helped author.

With the right to food, Battersby said the state had a role to respect, protect and fulfil the right. South Africa, she thinks, has fallen into the latter – facilitating or providing.

“It means the state has provided social grants and school feeding, but we don’t see proactive actions to respect and protect the right to food,” she said.

“Respecting the right to food is about respecting the right of informal traders to meet the food needs of the poor, around creating conditions for decent employment, creating access to affordable, nutritious food. That’s not on the policy agenda around the right to food.” 

It is also about protecting agricultural land, protecting consumers from unsafe food, and protection from health-harming foods.

From a policy front, Battersby thinks the sugary drinks tax is a step in the right direction, however she said that with the rollout of fast food joints on almost every corner, there seemed to be no resistance to that in municipal planning.

Battersby says that none of the major political parties have an appetite to regulate the large private sector actors because they make arguments about how they are “meeting the developmental needs of the country” and position themselves as the “saviours of food security”. 

“They situate themselves as generators of employment, facilitating local economic development and modernisation, but are not questioned on what they displace,” she added. “The actual number and quality of jobs created, the circulation of capital within communities, all of those things are being lost in the conversation – because the large private sector actors control the narrative and have the ear of the government.”

Informality in the system

“We’ve fallen into this narrative of ‘these are unsafe spaces’. We can’t ignore challenges around food safety, but I think it’s been very politically mobilised, and it’s been tied into languages of xenophobia. We need to be careful about who’s mobilising the language around food unsafety and what it’s being used for.”

The solution was not to hyper-regulate and shut things down, but to create an enabling environment, she said, as well as ensure municipal waste management, reliable electricity, and good sanitation occur.

It was about shifting the narrative from blaming the trader to thinking about the structural drivers of unsafe food conditions, and recognising these were essential food sources for the urban and rural poor, she said.

Some of the biggest food safety challenges in South Africa had been in the large-scale formal sector, which did not fit the narrative, she said. 

StatsSA defines the informal sector businesses as those that are not registered for Value Added Tax, but possibly registered for Income Tax. 

People talked about informality as though it was an entirely ungoverned space, she said. But they fell under different regulations and paid permit fees. It was not completely separate from the formal sector as the traders often bought from the formal sector. 

“There are people who want to entirely formalise the informal sector. I think that’s not useful.”

Another recent paper she on which she was an author pointed out that there is a paradox in the informal food space: the fact that there is a rich food culture and greater availability of traditional diets, but also nutrient-poor energy-high diets. 

Battersby highlighted the work of Professor Marc Wegerif at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, which shows that fresh and nutritious food is sold by street traders at far more affordable rates than in the supermarket sector.

Battersby’s position is that cooked food sellers should be supported so they can sell more diverse, nutritious food. 

“If you are in infrastructural poverty, and it’s hard to cook and store food, this [a trader] is actually where you can get nutritious food. While the informal sector is a vital source for affordable, nutritious food, it is also increasingly a source of cheap, ultra-processed food sold in small unit sizes by big food companies to gain a foothold in the low-income market.”

Two-minute noodles, sold in vast quantities through spaza’s and supermarkets, were a response to income poverty, time poverty, and energy poverty, she said. To shift this, the sector had to be regulated, but the conditions of people’s lives had to be improved too.

Battersby has a big problem with the term “convenience foods” (and the rise thereof) because she said it made it sound like people were being lazy, but it was a structural diet. And cities were designed to concentrate income, time and energy poverty. 

What do we need to change? 

We need to maintain a diverse food system, she said. We can’t fall into the trap of thinking the supermarket food system was going to meet our needs.

Thinking like that marginalised the small-scale actors who may be able to operate in less environmentally, socially and economically damaging ways than the big actors, she explained. Pushing for municipal markets and more fresh produce markets were part of that.

Maintaining spaces for informal and traditional food trade allowed people to make more climate-sensitive food decisions, without thinking of them as climate-sensitive.

If people could buy and cook fresh foods, and be less dependent on ultra-processed, high-energy use foods with high-plastic use, we would see knock-on effects, she concluded.

Battersby is currently a panel member at IPES-Food, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, a global think tank and expert group guiding action for sustainable food systems around the world. DM