LETTER: Food riots are looming

It’s well known that SA’s food prices have been rising at twice the inflation rate. This, in a country with an expanded unemployment rate of not far off 50% and a youth unemployment rate above 70%, is a slow motion train crash.

Food riots and looting stare us in the face. We simply have to reduce food costs. We waste and steal billions every year while our people starve. Our leaders destroy everything they touch. Now we sit on the precipice.

The chicken industry is the one that truly scares me. Chicken is the food product with the highest nutritional protein content. The average South African consumes more than 40kg of chicken a year.

Yet the industry is in a state of chaos, totally attributable to the government. Local poultry quality is excellent, but the industry is going nowhere. The government’s promises of higher import tariffs have been put on ice. Even if they are implemented today they will only cause prices to rise, regardless of the merits of dumping claims.

SA needs to steal and waste less, remove VAT from chicken and grant subsidies to local poultry to alleviate unfair and unreasonable burdens placed on it by constant power blackouts, disastrous water management, a huge breakdown of essential infrastructure, loss of harbour efficiency and the destruction of a previously functional rail system.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to predict where we are headed.

David Wolpert
Sydney, Australia

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