Dear Mr van Aswegen,
Thank you for your letter of 18 May 2026.
We take note of Shoprite’s regrettable refusal to participate in a public discussion on hunger, food prices and corporate responsibility, as well as our previous attempts at engagement with Shoprite since June last year.
Those refusals speak loudly.
On Thursday it is World Hunger Day. It comes at a time when we are facing a national emergency around access to food and nutrition in South Africa.
Every day, about 30 children die in South Africa where malnutrition and undernutrition are underlying causes. One in four children is stunted by the age of five. Stunting is not simply shortness. It is a mark of long-term deprivation. It impairs brain development, weakens learning, damages health, and reduces the chances that millions of children will ever fully thrive.
In this context, Shoprite’s language of concern, partnership and selective corporate social investment is inadequate. Your previous correspondence lists low-cost bread, meal donations, community gardens and partnerships as evidence of your contribution. Those initiatives may provide relief and they are welcome.
But they do not answer the structural question: why, in a country of mass hunger and chronic poor nutrition, are basic nutritious foods still priced beyond the reach of millions?
The issue is not whether Shoprite is “doing something”. The issue is whether South Africa’s largest food retailer is prepared to be publicly accountable for the pricing, profit and supply-chain practices that shape whether poor families have sufficient food and nutrition or go hungry.
Around the world, governments have recognised that food markets cannot be left untouched during hunger crises. Countries, like Mexico, France, Italy, Hungary and Greece, have used measures including price caps, subsidies and other direct interventions to protect access to staple foods. These are not radical ideas. They are ordinary public-interest tools when children’s lives are at stake.
Shoprite cannot hide behind charity while resisting public scrutiny. Hunger is not solved by public relations. It is solved by those with power being prepared to act and make sacrifices: this means real production costs being exposed, margins being questioned, and essential food being treated as a constitutional right rather than merely a commodity.
Your refusal to join a public discussion will therefore be understood for what it is: a decision not to face hungry people, not to answer civil society, and not to engage openly on the role of major retailers in South Africa’s hunger crisis. Moreover, you are refusing to accept the constitutional obligations arising from the right of “everyone to sufficient food.”
This week, to mark World Hunger Day, the Union Against Hunger will step up our campaign against Shoprite’s excessive pricing with peaceful, dignified pickets at stores around the country.
This will continue and escalate until you come to the table willing to meet as equals in a discussion about measures needed to end hunger and malnutrition. When you do eventually agree to consider serious price reductions on essential foods you will find the UAH to be solution-oriented and open to building consensus on meaningful measures that tackle our hunger and malnutrition crisis.
We will continue to demand affordable nutritious food, transparent pricing, and state action to protect children from hunger and stunting. Shoprite may decline the invitation, but it cannot decline responsibility and accountability.
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