WEBINAR: A Just Recovery: Rebuilding Food Systems after Covid-19 and Unrest in South Africa

This webinar aims to reframe the post-Covid and post-unrest ‘recovery’ discourse to foreground the danger of entrenched corporate power in the food system, and the immediate opportunities to “build back” different and better. This requires an understanding of inequality, power and politics in food systems. On the basis of social dialogues with people who derive their livelihoods as small-scale farmers, bakkie traders and street sellers, as well as ongoing research, we will report on some of the impacts on these urban food systems and identify ways this moment can be seized to reshape food systems beyond a narrow ‘recovery’ paradigm. With local government elections on the horizon, concrete action is needed. National regulation and policy should complement local solutions. Local government has a key role to play in creating, expanding and defending public space for non-corporate food producers, distributors and sellers.

AFRA Fieldworker, Ayanda Madlala, and Dudu Ngcobo, a street trader and a key informant in the AFRA food systems project are panelists in the webinar and presented how the food system in uMgungundlovu has been affected from one crisis to another and the responses by role players in the food system.