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.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its control measures had a devastating impact on household food security in South Africa. The pandemic brought existing food injustice patterns, such as spatial inequality, intersectionality, and the causes of food poverty to the forefront, especially for women. It also galvanized momentum in the people's agenda for solidarity and stimulated community members' calls for an overhaul of the existing commercialized food system toward hyper-localized, community-led solutions such as food dialogs and community kitchens. First and foremost, that meant talking about hunger and addressing its root causes. This paper reports on a co-research process on household food security during the pandemic in four neighborhoods of the Cape Flats. This study found that household food insecurity and the roles women play in food systems are significantly shaped by intersectionality: the consequences of being women, Black or Persons of Color, residents of geographies of social and economic marginalization within the city, and historically excluded from higher education. In this paper, we provide reflections on the co-research process from the perspectives of co-researchers, the project coordinator, and the project funder by applying a critical feminist framework and by answering the question: How can critical feminist research steer community-led action? Community members from the Cape Flats and five post-graduate students from a Berlin-based institute conceptualized this study and it was implemented by community researchers and projects partners in 2020. The paper highlights important aspects of the methodology, particularly the joint contextualization and sense making of findings by community researchers who placed food insecurity results in the context of their lived experiences. Based on their discussions, the co-researchers created visions for post-COVID-19 food environments, one of which is discussed in this paper: destigmatization of hunger. Hunger was described by co-researchers as a problem hidden by individuals and silenced by communities.
TMG’s Urban Food Futures programme closes its scoping phase with a series of reports summarising the main insights lying the foundation for the next phase of action research. Grounded in the right to food and the six dimensions of food security, this working paper explores how community kitchens, school feeding programmes, and informal saving schemes work and how communities use them to cope with shocks. The paper investigates how vulnerable urban communities in Ouagadougou, Nairobi, and Cape Town use these three components to combat hunger and food insecurity in times of crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic, violent evictions, and armed conflicts. The paper further explores both the potential and the barriers of these initiatives to become urban nutrition hubs, places where community members engage in dialogues and build social capital to understand the structural conditions of hunger and what they can do to address them.
TMG’s Urban Food Futures programme closes its scoping phase with a series of reports summarising the main insights lying the foundation for the next phase of action research. This working paper, written in collaboration with partners African Centre for Cities (ACC), FACT and Muungano AMT, argues that for the progressive realization of the right to food in urban settings, food sensitive planning and urban design must be integrated into urban governance actions. Findings from Ouagadougou, Nairobi, and Cape Town indicate the necessary steps that need to be taken toward more food-sensitive planning: clearly defining the mandate to govern urban food systems by national and local governments; drawing from community knowledge and experience for strategic thinking around food systems, and politicising urban food system issues to create the momentum needed in holding relevant authorities accountable.
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