APPETITE FOR DIGNITY Despite efforts to address hunger at Wits, ad hoc food security interventions cannot keep pace with increasing numbers of hungry students. The Food Sovereignty Centre at Wits not only empowers and dignifies food-stressed Witsies but is also a model of how to shift beyond food security initiatives to food sovereignty alternatives. VISHWAS SATGAR AND JANE CHERRY
W
hile interventions such as feeding schemes on campus are necessary in the short term, they don’t offer sustainable solutions for food-stressed students. Add climate change to the mix, and the future for hungry students is even bleaker. Our natural food-producing systems are unravelling and hunger is increasing. Finding sustainable solutions to hunger, climate change, and environmental degradation involves tackling the root of the crises. Advocates of food sovereignty and climate justice identify systemic causes – and solutions lie not in existing ‘business as usual’ trajectories, but rather in community, ecological and people-based alternatives. The Food Sovereignty Centre at Wits provides a pathway for such alternatives on campus and the inner city of Johannesburg.
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FOOD SOVEREIGNTY TAKES ROOT AT WITS
Food sovereignty refers to a food system in which the right to food is affirmed through control by small scale farmers and consumers to ensure agro-ecological food production, solidarity economy relations, healthy and culturally appropriate food. A series of factors and events culminated in what became the Food Sovereignty Centre at Wits. These include the formation of a student-led food sovereignty and climate justice forum, which students in the International Relations class at Wits organised. The forum was formalised as a student society, the Inala Forum, in 2015. Inala is isiZulu for ‘abundance’. Another factor was a march in 2016 against high food prices. Here Inala, the Co-operative and Policy Alternative Centre (COPAC – a grassroots NGO), and the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign (SAFSC) handed over a memorandum to
University management. The memorandum highlighted the plight of hunger in our universities and the need for Wits to support the call for a zero waste, zero hunger, and zero carbon institution. A central demand of the memorandum was a space of dignity for food-stressed students whom the Wits Community Citizenship and Outreach (WCCO) programme supports. The WCCO runs a feeding scheme, which provides more than 1 000 hot meals to students daily, and a food bank, which provides students with non-perishables. The University subsequently earmarked the Sanctuary Building on Braamfontein Campus East for a Food Sovereignty Centre.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT TOO Inala, the WCCO, and COPAC have since deepened their collaborative efforts to establish the Food Sovereignty Centre and its composite parts. A food garden that Inala initiated on campus in 2015 now
