Climate change - food security in South Africa

 South Africa:

In this post I am going to assess how climate change might affect food and water in South Africa. This may seem like a strange case study location to choose as relative to other African countries, South Africa is often perceived as one that is considered “a food secure nation” (Masipa, 2017:4). 

 

However, within Hendricks (2005) study he calculates that between 58 to 73% of households have experienced food insecurity across South Africa despite its assumed ‘food secure’ status. Further urgency has also recently been added towards assessing the potential effects of global warming on food security in South Africa by “the worst drought” it has ever experienced “in living memory” and water shortages that have persisted in South Africa from 2015, up until today. Watch the following video to understand the magnitude of this drought problem in South Africa – this is what inspired me to choose South Africa as my specific cast study.

 

Video 1: The effect of droughts in South Africa on food availability and production

In this video, a single farmer explains how he has lost 9 of his cattle due to this drought, whilst another explains that he has had to shut down his cattle farm due to having no available land for his cattle to graze. The extent to which such arable land is being destroyed as a result of climate change is epitomised in Figure 6 which demonstrates how there is a direct correlation between increasing C0₂ emissions and decreasing per capita hectares of arable farm land. 

  

 

Figure 6: Depicts the relationship between arable land and Carbon dioxide

 

In this post I therefore hope to illuminate the problems of food and water in South Africa. By using South Africa, I hope to demonstrate that, if this is the potential consequences of climate change towards a country in sub-Saharan Africa that is considered relatively ‘food-secure’ – imagine the impact and devastations of climate change towards countries in the region that are worse off. In addition to this, South Africa is also an interesting case study as it has the second highest fruit import value to the UK at 10% of the total value, as depicted in Figure 7. Key fruits imported from South Africa to the UK include grapes and apples. South Africa is therefore a good factor for us to consider the potentially wider reaching impacts of climate change on food and water in Africa.

Figure 7: Shows the fruit imports to the UK as a percentage of total value

With anywhere between 5 to 170 million people under potential risk of hunger by just 2080, it is no surprise that South Africa is no exception to this risk (Schmidhuber and Francesco, 2007). A study conducted at household level by Hendriks unearthed the fact that large proportions of rural households in South Africa are still vulnerable to spells of food insecurity due to a lack of rain water for crop irrigation. This is further supported by Demetre et al (2009) who quantified that 21 million or approximately 35% of South Africa’s population are vulnerable to food insecurity related to global warming and it association with a worsening of droughts. Figure 8 below demonstrates that although food adequacy across South African provinces averages approximately 79%, there are still on average 21% of households who have ‘severely inadequate’ or ‘inadequate access’ to food. With global warming causing severe droughts and therefore a lack of water across South Africa, the problem of food security across the nation could mount to critical levels nationwide by 2050, and even sooner for rural settlers across the countries who will be the hardest hit by droughts as they are mainly farmers. 

 

 

Figure 8: Depicts the food adequacy of households grouping them by province is South Africa

 

The case study of South Africa demonstrated that the impacts of climate change can and will vary across Africa, particularly between rural and urban settlers. I also wanted to demonstrate that although South Africa is considered a relatively food secure country the potential impacts of climate change on its food and water are still devastating.

 

However, all hope is not lost, farming in the Limpopo basin for example has a heavy reliance on groundwater as a result of repeated droughts. Thus, next week I will explore if groundwater is the answer to these problems.