Tuesday, 19 May 2015
Thursday, 18 September 2014
Supermarkets and the Scandal of Hunger
Moving Posts #3
The poor cannot afford their daily bread
The poor cannot afford their daily bread
The irony of the Witness news headlines (Retail turf war heats up) did not escape me as PACSA and Oxfam presented facts on hunger in South Africa today: A national supermarket chain goes head to head with a transnational supermarket chain to protect their trade monopoly in fresh produce in shopping malls across the country.
As consumers we are led to believe that competition is good for us, because it drives food prices down. Critical consumers, however, know that these same supermarkets have pushed out local shops and informal traders, who are a critical part of a truly competitive market.
Although price collusion by corporates is a global phenomenon, corporates in South Africa got away with a slap on the wrist for fixing the price of bread and of milk, food staples for the poor. The studies by PACSA and Oxfam GB confirm the research findings of the NGO alliance I represent: the poor can no longer afford their daily bread. 1 in 4 households go hungry each day, and half of our population is at risk of hunger.
Due to rising food prices the poor further spiral into poverty. The legal battle between two Goliaths is paid from profits made over the backs of the small food producers, corner shops, and urban and rural poor who have found the mall’s sliding doors shut in their faces.
I call on you to help David – or perhaps this time it is his powerful female incarnation - rise again against Goliath.
The Scandal of Hunger in Our Wealthy Nation
I feel cheap, I feel smallmy children go hungrythey will stay small toolittle money buys little foodcheap food, expired foodsmall packets of potato, a bit of ricemaize meal if we’re luckypeople look down on melaugh and gossip because I’m poormake me feel even smallera failure-of-a-mother, a failed fatherno longer a bread winneras my child asks “Ma, when will we have bread again?”
Monique Salomon, coordinator of Tshintsha Amakhaya,
NGO alliance for land and food justice
- The poor cannot afford their daily bread The Witness 18 Sept 2014
- Retail turf war heats up.The Witness 16 Sept 2014
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
What the donor wants. And what we hear
Moving Posts #1
In her report Inspiring soulful organizations, Jessica Horn documents a process of strengthening CSOs involving deep reflection, technical support, and coaching. A range of insights emerged that apply to our context. I want to share this piece on the donor-NGO relationship. Do you recognize yourself?Case study 1: Improving donor-grantee relationships by expanding ways of seeing
Reviewing funding challenges in Organisation 1, the consultant found on-going mutual tension between staff and a key donor. The donor felt that responses around grant proposals were consistently late and did not answer clearly the questions that they asked. Staff was equally frustrated by constant questions from the donor and a sense that these were a burden on their time.
The consultant suggested using the experience as a case study, asking staff to print out all the emails between the donor and the organisation and analyse both what the donor had been requesting and what staff had been providing in response using the key question ‘what is the mystery?
The consultant explains: ‘What we realised was that the donor was asking for bigger picture analysis and direction, and the staff kept responding with detail which did not answer these larger strategic questions. We also related that to the broader challenge within the organisation of focusing on responding to immediate needs of their constituency, and moving from project to project, while not always ‘flying above’ to see how it all hangs together.
The organisation was also failing to meet donor deadlines, and we began to understand that this was due to a lack of clear responsibility amongst the staff around who was tasked to respond. Staff did not see the point of the donor questions, saw responding to them as a chore, and would pass the responsibility around.
There was a lot of antagonism around it. When the group realised what the donor had actually been asking for, and what they had been doing in response, there was hysterical laughter in the room and the sense that ‘now we realise why this is not working’.
The group went on to refine their Theory of Change. They understood that the donor actually wanted to know how the projects linked to their broader mission and promise to the world. A few weeks later, the donor visited and they presented their work with this big picture view– both staff and the donor were relieved, it was like a reconciliation!’
Monique Salomon, coordinator of Tshintsha Amakhaya
Click to Access the report: Horn, Jessica 2013. Inspiring soulful organizations. A pilot in capacity development for Ugandan women’s rights organisations. Hivos Knowledge Programme 13.
What is our Stand on Land?
Moving Posts #2
This commentary is written following a two-day Conference on agrarian question after twenty years of democracy at the University of Cape Town[i]. I invite you to read my impression of the debate and share your response to the headline above.We no longer believe that State-driven land reform is possible. The institutional structures tasked with land and agrarian reform are unreformed and perpetuate the land-race-gender battle. The Government will only de-racialize and reform the agrarian structure within a capitalist trajectory. Market-led land reform has turned into a show of global capitalist investors of ‘wolves’ dressed as social responsible ‘lambs’.
Two positions were heard on extreme sides of the land reform and agrarian change continuum. The first scenario argues the need to reform the agrarian structure and ‘leave the past behind’ for economic purposes. It proposes to invest in 250 000 Black peasants - commercial smallholder farmers with market access - as sole beneficiaries for land reform, while offering some production support to the millions of Black food producers and smallholder farmers. The second scenario proposes to remove Section 25 from the Constitution and distribute all land through a simple application process.
Both proposals are extreme not ‘radical’ in its implications. The first scenario prioritizes a particular group of food producers considered deserving of land. In a way it echoes the scare tactics of organized White agriculture about food insecurity and loss of foreign investment, often citing the ‘Zimbabwe nightmare of bad things happening when Black people own the land’. The second scenario propagates access to land for all and cutting out the red tape that characterize Government land reform efforts. Yet it ignores how structural inequality and power differentials play themselves out in pro-poor access to resources and assets. The RDP Housing programme is an example of how the better-off benefit from Government schemes explicitly aimed at the poorer segments of society.
If we believe that people-driven land reform is the way, we need to tap into and support acts of resistance on the ground. The experience with the Landless Peoples Movement suggests that our great expectation of a social movement might look very different from what we know or expect. Such movements might be more modest and localized, mobilizing around a critical event in people’s lives. For members of the LPM in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, the burial of a farm dweller served as an anchor point for protest action.
Historiographies and heroic events in the past also inspire today’s struggles. The site of resistance - a hillside - and songs sung by mineworkers at Marikana seemed to mimic the Mpondo revolt of the 1940s in the Eastern Cape, where most of the drill operators come from. The farm workers strikes have shown that peoples’ struggles can also reproduce and entrench power dynamics and inequality along race-gender-class-migration-nationality lines.
The approach to land reform in Zimbabwe was a ‘quick and cheap’ way of dismantling, de-racializing and democratizing the agrarian structure. Not wanting to downplay the violence and devastation that occurred, the grassroots agrarian sector in Zimbabwe was able to bounce back from the economic downturn, international sanctions, and lack of Government support.
Where does this leave us as civil society role players and collective? In an open letter the CIVICUS Alliance[iii] calls on civil society to critically examine their practices. They flag that the new generation of activists has emerged. They are globally connected, quick in responding to issues, and criticize the development bureaucracy in which established NGOs are caught up in.
So enrich the debate and share
your views!
Pietermaritzburg, 22 August 2014
Monique Salomon, coordinator of Tshintsha Amakhaya
[i] Scholars
and civil society actors gathered at the University of Cape Town on 14 and 15
Aug to reflect on South Africa’s agrarian questions after twenty years of
democracy. The Conference, hosted by the Centre for African Studies and
Heinrich Boll Stiftung, zoomed in on the mismatch between theory on land and
agrarian and the realities on the ground, the role of the post-apartheid,
neo-liberal state, and the role of civil society in agrarian change. The inputs
of Prof Ben Cousins of PLAAS and MP Andile Mngxitama of the Economic Freedom
Fighters brought the debate to a head.
[ii] TA Facebook
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