Johannesburg – As South Africa continues to face a deepening energy crisis, longer and more frequent periods of load-shedding are negatively affecting many industry sectors throughout the country and are contributing significantly to the fast-declining economy.
Increasingly, companies that report their financial results indicate that a large portion of their revenue is being eroded by having to seek alternative sources of energy, such as procuring diesel fuel to run generators.
As a result, many businesses are facing the prospect of either closing their doors or rightsizing their operations to cope with higher operating costs brought on by the lack of reliable energy supply in South Africa.
This is according to Tiger Brands Foundation (TBF) Operations Manager Karl Muller, who says the resulting impact of the energy crisis is that more and more people are losing their jobs, while the cost of living continues to increase on the back of rising inflation and interest rates.
“The overall trend that we are seeing is lower profitability for businesses, which means that those organisations that typically support in-school nutrition programmes, either through their corporate social investment initiatives or as part of an existing long-term financial arrangement, are going to experience a profit squeeze,” he says.
“This is very likely to go to impact not just TBF, but a whole host of other in-school nutrition programmes across the country. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when the most vulnerable in society can least afford to be left in the lurch.”
Staple foods becoming unaffordable
According to recent research published by the Agricultural Business Chamber, the increased cost is the biggest impact on South Africa’s agri-businesses due to load shedding, with food producers having to spend large amounts of money to run diesel generators.
This, in turn, has a knock-on effect on food prices, with many staple foods becoming unaffordable for poorer households.
“With the poverty and unemployment rates already at staggeringly high levels in South Africa, a huge portion of the population was already food insecure,” says Muller.
“Food price inflation driven by load shedding will only add to this problem, with an increasing number of people now facing the prospect of going hungry.”
He points out that load shedding is critically harming the production costs of grains such as maize, wheat, and soybeans, resulting in higher prices for grain products like maize and bread.
Figures released by Statistics South Africa reveal that local food prices were up 14.4% over the year ended March, which is the highest rate of local food inflation since 2009.
The high cost of staple foods has ultimately resulted in a lot of nutritious food being removed from the family table, which hurts overall household health and wellbeing, as well as child development.
Research by the Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity group shows that in January 2023, the average cost of a household’s food basket was 11.7% more than it was in January last year.
In rand terms, this was an increase of R516.40 – from R4 401.02 to R4 917.42.
Out of reach for majority
“This means that it cost South Africans more than R500 more for a balanced nutritious food basket at the beginning of this year than it did a year ago. This is an alarming increase and well out of reach for the majority of vulnerable households,” says Muller.
He notes that this has essentially resulted in the perfect storm, where more children from less privileged households will become dependent on in-school nutrition programmes, while organisations that support these initiatives are also under financial pressure and struggling to donate as much as did before.
“From TBF’s perspective, we would like to make a call to organisations to contribute to established nutrition programmes to ensure that 100% of their contributions will go towards alleviating the financial pressures experienced by NGOs due to the rising cost of living,” says Muller.
“TBF already has all the infrastructure in place so it would be easy for it to leverage new contributions to ensure that they have maximum impact on the most vulnerable learners in our communities.”
Well-established programmes
Muller explains that by contributing to well-established nutrition programmes, businesses would not have to worry about running their programmes and having to consider their reach in terms of how many vulnerable learners receive a nutritious breakfast or compromise on the quality of meals.
“At times like these, we need to position ourselves to do more with less. Therefore, maximising resources by allocating them where they will have the most impact should priority for any organisation that wants to contribute meaningfully to nutrition programmes that have real impact,” says Muller.
Since its inception in 2011, the TBF’s in-school breakfast programme, which complements the lunch provided by the National School Nutrition Programme, has proven to be one of the most efficient nutrition programmes in South Africa, serving nutritious meals to tens of thousands of learners from underprivileged communities daily.
TBF currently provides nutritious breakfasts to 67 700 learners each day, at 91 schools around the country in all provinces.
