AMCU, FAWU and Numsa to strike again for 1% pay rise

Just kidding. But it is the amount that the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK are on strike for.

Here in South Africa it is more common to demand double digit pay rises. The Communication Workers Union (CWU), for example, is currently demanding a 15% pay rise.

The strikes are mainly viewed with annoyance or alarm by business owners and other people who don't strike (find the Zapiro satirical cartoon of the CWU, for example). But perhaps the 2014 Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Social Action (PACSA) Food Price Barometer gives us food for thought.

Poor and working class households spend most of their money on food. Well, this is after other expenses - funerals, electricity, furniture repayments, transport and school fees ... Money spent on food must adapt to what is left. The figure that statisticians bandy about is actually different to what SHOULD be spent on food, and actually hides "the food affordability crisis in South Africa". 

The Core staples measured in the Barometer include maize meal, rice, flour, bread, potatoes, sugar and oil. These are increasingly more expensive and unaffordable, and as the price increases the poor settle for cheaper brands.

Um, what happens when they can no longer afford the cheaper brands ...?

What's for dinner, luv?

Four blocks from where I live is an intersection on Louis Botha Avenue where unemployed men wait during the day, hoping that someone will offer them a job. That's not permanent employment, just something to keep hunger at bay.

South Africa is food secure as a country -- but 14-million people do not know where their next meal will come from. And another 15-million are only just not as desperate.

Some talk of the nature of agriculture, that increasingly it exists to produces food for the wealthy. Others roll up their sleeves and get on with teaching the vulnerable to grow food gardens. Some, like the Mail & Guardian newsroom, have a challenge out today to try live this day on #6Rand [just over half an American dollar], like many of the people in this country do.

At the same time, the world's scandal is that one-third of the food produced is wasted and lost. Find the Youtube clip, just over three minutes, on this.

Today is the United Nations' World Food Day.

Today, especially, food should be eaten with great awareness.

Find the chapter on food security in The Agri Handbook here.

Do penguins eat white maize or yellow maize?

Hats off to Dr Herman van Schalkwyk, CEO of the AMT, for including a contribution by Philip Lymbery, author of Farmageddon and CEO of Compassion in Worldwide Farming, at the AMT Conference in the week just passed.

The book and the presentation pose serious questions to future scenarios of agriculture.

Included in the opening slides by Lymbery was one of penguins, victims of recent trends in agriculture: food which is in their diet has been removed (to feed animals in industrial farming) and this has led to some very hungry penguins.

We were expecting more challenges from the audience which included a prominent GMO activist and several agribusinesses with some stake in intensive meat production enterprises (also referred to as "factory farming" and "industrial farming").

There were two contributions from the floor. The first, a humorous enquiry whether penguins preferred white or yellow maize (corn). The second, a professor from the University of the Free State, thanked Lymbery for his presentation and said he felt agriculture in this country had not reached the same levels of industrialisation as elsewhere in the world, but that the presentation was a welcome marker to be borne in mind for the future.

We don't know if we agree completely with the last sentiment (there are several intensive meat production enterprises is this country). Nonetheless, it is International Animal week this week (4 to 10 October) and the question about how we treat our animals is one the globe faces, not just this week but every week!