How a single body could make South Africa’s food safer

It was the deaths of Zinhle Maama, Isago Mabote, Njabulo Msimango, Katlego Olifant, Karabo Rampou and Monica Sebetwana that were the final straw. The children, all under the age of 9, died after eating a packet of chips tainted with a dangerous pesticide, which has since been found in three spaza shops not far from their home in Naledi, Soweto.

Their deaths — and the deaths of 16 other children and the nearly 900 people who were sickened from foodborne illnesses across the country over just two months — sparked outrage and the declaration of a national disaster.  

President Cyril Ramaphosa pulled together the departments of health; trade and industry; agriculture; basic education and small business development, as well as the police and military health services, the National Consumer Commission and National Institute for Communicable Diseases. A ministerial task force rolled out plans for rodent infestation clean-ups, community education programmes and a major push for the registration of small businesses and spaza shops. 

But the government response underscored the complex and sprawling, multi-agency way the nation’s food system is set up. Could part of the fix be a single food safety agency?

Not fit for purpose

Since the start of 2023, more than 3 000 people have got sick with suspected foodborne illnesses, which happen when someone eats contaminated food, whether because of germs or chemicals, including toxic substances. In South Africa, infections from bacteria like Salmonella — usually from meat, poultry, eggs or milk — and Clostridium perfringens, often linked to improperly heated gravy, poultry or other meat, are some of the more common causes of foodborne diseases.

Listeriosis, a disease caused by the microbe Listeria monocytogenes, which had contaminated ready-to-eat meat products, sickened 1 060 people and eventually caused 216 deaths in the country between January 2017 and July 2018.  

A study looking at the government’s response to the outbreak found that South Africa’s food safety system wasn’t “fit for purpose” because of a disjointed handling of the issue, with little interaction between different state bodies and confusion over whose responsibility it was to check that safe food is sold, including by informal traders. 

At the time, Ramaphosa announced plans to create a single agency for food safety. 

But more than six years later, this body has yet to be set up. 

“The work to establish a single food agency requires legislative changes and this will take some time to arrive at the final destination,” says Foster Mohale, spokesperson for the health department.

Work on this began in 2018 when a team from the health, agriculture and trade and industry departments submitted a report to parliament. But the government lawmakers’ term ended before a decision was made and the department will wait to see if the new committee will use the report or start over, says Mohale.

Food safety oversight

For now, making sure the food we eat is safe before it lands on shelves is the job of the health, agriculture and trade and industry departments, with support from the fisheries, forestry and environment department, border management authority and National Consumer Commission.

The health department checks that places that make, serve and sell food follow hygiene and safety rules and respond to foodborne outbreaks. The agriculture department handles the registration of pesticides and imports and exports of animal products, while the trade and industry department oversees the food products entering and leaving the country, ensuring they meet local and international standards. 

One of the authors of a study published in BMC Public Health in July that looked at food fraud in South Africa — when food suppliers deliberately sell goods they know aren’t safe for consumption — says it is that lack of coordinated oversight that allows unsafe food to enter the system. A single control authority, like the Food and Drug Administration in the US, or the Food Standards Agency in the UK, Phoka Rathebe, associate professor of environmental health at the University of Johannesburg, says, would help ensure coordination across the whole supply chain.

Below target

Much of the enforcement of rules meant to ensure that people can trust that their food is safe comes from environmental health practitioners (EHPs). But last year there were just 1 712 of these health inspectors across the country which, for a population of around 63 million, works out to about one for every 37 000 people. That’s far below the health department’s target of one for every 10 000 people, which they say is the norm.  

EHPs are responsible for everything from checking that public water supplies are safe and waste isn’t dumped in places it shouldn’t be to running campaigns to teach communities about things like how to clean their water and use paraffin to heat their homes and cook safely.

Enforcing safety rules that help prevent foodborne outbreaks coming from the informal sector, which is particularly difficult to regulate, is another part of their job.

But in a study among EHPs working in Ekurhuleni, a municipality in Gauteng, less than half of the 61 respondents said that they felt properly trained to handle foodborne outbreaks.

Blame game

Since November, inspections of spaza shops throughout the country found food stored alongside pesticides and fake and expired foods. More than 1 000 outlets, from spaza shops to warehouses, have been shut down since, for running without a licence and not following rules for storing and preparing food.

With a major small business and spaza shop registration drive, the government plans to create a database of informal shops, a move they say will help with regulation. 

“The biggest challenge,” says Mohale, “is that community members would just open [stores] without notifying the municipality. [These cases only] get picked up when there are joint operations or [when] incidents are reported.”

But Leslie London and Andrea Rother from the environmental health division of the University of Cape Town’s School of Public Health don’t believe the problem is solely rooted in informal shops but rather in weak regulations on toxic chemicals and badly run municipalities.

“Everyone wants to assign blame for this tragedy, but spaza shop owners are not the culprits,” they wrote in the Mail & Guardian in November. 

Many townships deal with rodent infestations because municipalities don’t collect rubbish, which builds up in the streets. Residents and business owners turn to cheap pesticides sold at train stations and taxi ranks to keep their homes and shops rat-free.

Rother has been studying these “street pesticides” — chemicals registered only for agricultural use, or banned outright, but sold in old beverage bottles or small packets as a cheap and quick fix to kill rodents — for more than 15 years.

In an op-ed published in The Conversation, she writes that these products end up on the streets because of poor enforcement, a lack of measures to keep children safe (who are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of contact with pesticides), outdated legislation and the pay-to-access database of registered pesticides, which is run by the pesticide industry.

The agriculture department is inspecting the five manufacturers registered to sell organophosphate, the pesticide that killed the children from Naledi, to find out how it is making its way onto the streets. 

But that won’t take away the pain of the families of the 22 children who died.

“We are hurt as parents, Otlotleng Msimango, the mother of seven-year-old Njabulo, told the SABC. “Even Njabulo’s father, he can’t speak or utter a word.”

This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for the newsletter.