Explaining the Normalisation of Black Hunger in South Africa: Not Enough Food, or Not Enough Empathy?

Indicators of hunger such as child stunting rates are disproportionately high in South Africa, more than three decades after the transition to democracy in 1994. Hunger and malnutrition are also racialized, being heavily concentrated among Black South Africans but negligible among Whites. 1 Standard explanations for hunger focus on supply and demand factors, such as inadequate food availability, or inability to purchase adequate food due to poverty. Food supply deficits are not a major concern in South Africa, but poverty is, and poverty, like hunger, is highly correlated with race.

This paper draws attention to another factor that might explain the persistence of hunger in South Africa and other highly unequal societies – “normalisation,” which in this context describes situations where governments and societies tolerate anomalously high levels of hunger, even when a justiciable legal right to food exists that should make hunger socially, politically, and legally unacceptable. This hypothesis derives from a research program led by the Food Equity Center at the UK Institute of Development Studies, called “Challenging the Normalisation of Hunger in Highly Unequal Societies” (Devereux et al. 2022). The research aims to understand why high levels of hunger are not adequately addressed by state interventions (government policies and programs), civil society activities (charity or activism), or direct action by hungry citizens (e.g. food riots).

South Africa, an upper-middle-income country where food availability, state capacity and fiscal resources are more than adequate to eradicate hunger, was selected as a case study. The state has not devoted sufficient effort toward achieving this objective. Arguably, this reflects the reality that Black hunger has been a feature of South Africa’s colonial, apartheid, and post-apartheid history for more than three and a half centuries, so Black hunger has become normalized, and is not a priority concern even of the Black majority ANC government. This is in stark contrast to the “poor White” problem in the 1930s, when poverty among Afrikaners was neither tolerated nor normalized, and the Carnegie Commission made recommendations which laid the basis for apartheid policies that institutionalized White domination and White privilege – and their correlates, Black marginalization and Black deprivation (Carnegie Corporation 2004).

This paper first explains why persistently high levels of household food insecurity and child malnutrition in contemporary South Africa should be considered as a paradox. Understanding this paradox starts from the recognition that South African society has been racially stratified since the arrival of the first European settlers, and that poverty and hunger have always been concentrated among Black people in South Africa, because of their deliberately constructed economic and political marginalization

Next, the paper briefly reviews relevant literature on two pertinent concepts: normalization, and empathy. Then the methodology for primary data collection is presented. A sample of 600 South Africans, stratified by several criteria including ethnicity, was interviewed, inter alia, about their personal experiences of hunger and their attitudes toward other people suffering hunger. The findings are presented and discussed in subsequent sections, before the paper concludes.

To cite this article: Stephen Devereux & Kenechukwu Ikebuaku (28 Jun 2026): Explaining the Normalisation of Black Hunger in South Africa: Not Enough Food, or Not Enough Empathy?, Ecology of Food and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/03670244.2026.2693925

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03670244.2026.2693925