What Are The Factors That Affect Food Security

6. Results: Findings of previous research & studies

Findings: Challenges affecting household ability to be food secure: Poverty, unemployment, inequality and food security are integrally linked. Hunger is strongly prevalent in households with little or no income. The majority KZN‟s poor are reliant on incomes to access food. However, the unprecedented levels of unemployment in South Africa combined with large number of “working poor” makes achieving food security challenging. The South Africa’s extensive social assistance programmes are recognised to contribute to reducing food insecurity and act as an important safety net for most poor and vulnerable households. Although the state has an ambitious plan to enhance employment in South Africa, mainly through short term public employment programmes, these are low paying jobs and hence cannot contribute effectively to addressing food and nutrition security. A further challenge is that fewer people in South Africa rely on access to land and involvement in agriculture to grow food for own consumption. Other challenges affecting food and nutrition security include high prices and the main concern is food price inflation that often exceeds the general inflation. Furthermore, climate change is considered a major greatest threat to agriculture and food security in the 21st century, particularly in many of the poor, agriculture-based countries of sub-Saharan Africa with their low capacity to effectively cope. The impacts of climate change already being experienced in many parts of the world are expected to lead to disproportionately negative food insecurity

The IFSS has been largely considered a failure mainly due to the fact that food insecurity remains a pressing concern with over 14 million food insecure people in South Africa and very little progress in realisation of the Millennium Development Goal target of halving those in hunger by