The COVID-19 outbreak forced governments to make decisions that had adverse effects on local food systems and supply chains. As a result, many small-scale food producers faced difficulties growing, harvesting, and selling their goods. This participatory research examines local small-scale farmers’ challenges as farmers but also as consumers and their coping strategies during the month of April and one week in June 2020. The study was initiated and conceptualized in collaboration with small-scale farmer members of an existing research network in selected urban and rural areas in South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Indonesia. Participants co-designed the research, collected and uploaded data through digital survey tools, and contributed to data analysis and interpretation. A common observation across regions is that the measures imposed in response to COVID-19 highlighted and partly exacerbated existing socio-economic inequalities among food system actors. Strict lockdowns in Cape Town, South Africa, and Masvingo, Zimbabwe, significantly restricted the production capacity of small-scale farmers in the informal economy and created more food insecurity for them. In Maputo, Mozambique, and Toraja and Java, Indonesia, local food systems continued to operate and were even strengthened by higher social capital and adaptive capacities.
After decades of neoliberal rule in which market forces held pre-eminence in shaping development, there has in recent years been a resurgence of an activist developmental state in promoting economic development and tackling poverty and inequality. This article explores the resurgence of developmental state thinking in South Africa. Specifically, the article critically appraises the functioning of the post-apartheid state as it relates to land reform and rural development and argues that a weak bureaucracy and a policy fixation on the neoliberal willing buyer, willing seller policy framework militates against the promotion of a thorough-going land reform and rural development programme to promote rural livelihoods. We argue that South Africa needs a developmental state that will construct a skilled and competent bureaucracy, a centralised planning agency with the power to coordinate and ensure that government departments work together, and that will actively intervene in the economy to meet developmental objectives.
The issue of peace and its drivers is central to erudition on Hind Swaraj and associated texts dealing with liberty, self-rule, world order and social integrity. In this article, we therefore aim to describe a specific articulation of peace, embedded in peace psychology and the Global Peace Index (GPI), which was first initiated in 2007 and subsequently revised in 2008 and 2009. The GPI, which places countries according to their levels of peacefulness, offers insights into the determinants of peace. We explain the origins and scope of the GPI, examine how it expresses peace and assess its usefulness. We suggest specific modification to the three key measures used by the GPI to evaluate a country’s peacefulness. Focusing on South Africa, India, Brazil and the United States of America (USA), we recommend that indices of globalisation may be incorporated to enhance the currency of the index. Throughout the article we emphasise human security as a key element of peace.
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