The Freedom Charter says: Rent and prices shall be lowered; food plentiful and no one shall go hungry.The ANC is committed to creating an environment that ensures that there is adequate food available to all, that we grow our own food and protect the poor communities from the rising prices of food and eradicate hunger.
The ANC government will take the following practical steps:
- Promote food security as a way to lessen our dependence on food imports.
- Introduce a food for all programme to procure and distribute basic foods at affordable prices to poor households and communities. Government will develop an appropriate institutional approach for the implementation of this programme.
- Introduce measures to improve the logistics of food distribution such as transportation, warehousing, procurement and outsourcing in order to reduce food prices in the long term. Continued enforcement of stronger competition measures will be used to act against food cartels and collusion, which inflate food prices.
- Expand access to food production schemes in rural and peri-urban areas to grow their own food with implements, tractors, fertilizers and pesticides. Other government measures will support existing community schemes, which utilise land for food production in schools, health facilities, churches and urban and traditional authority areas.
- Ensure an emergency food relief programme, on a mass-scale, in the form of food assistance projects to the poorest households and communities including through partnerships with religious and other community organisations.
