A renewed World Food Day appeal puts coordination, storage and distribution at the centre of reducing losses, while older research shows that the problem extends well beyond households.
South Africa’s response to food waste needs to connect surplus food with people who can use it, alongside efforts to prevent losses throughout the production and distribution chain.
That is the central proposal in a World Food Day statement by Stellenbosch Business School’s Prof Jako Volschenk, published as a press release on 15 October. He called for coordinated action involving government, businesses and organisations that distribute food.
The appeal draws attention to a practical gap between having food somewhere in the supply chain and making it available, safely and in time, to households elsewhere.
The national estimate is older research
The widely cited estimate of 10.3 million tonnes of edible food lost or wasted annually comes from CSIR research published in 2021. It should not be presented as a new measurement of losses during 2026.
The CSIR placed the estimate at about 34% of local food production and 45% of the food available domestically after accounting for South Africa’s net exports. Those percentages use different denominators and are not interchangeable.
Its breakdown attributed 49% of losses and waste to processing and packaging, 19% to post-harvest handling and storage, and 18% to consumption. The national figure therefore covers a supply-chain problem, rather than only food thrown away by households.
The distinction matters when deciding where to intervene. Improving home food planning addresses one part of the total; it cannot on its own resolve losses occurring before products reach a shop or a kitchen.
Recover food before it becomes waste
Volschenk’s proposals include stronger coordination of storage, transport and distribution, as well as incentives to direct safe surplus food to food banks and other organisations. He also advocates stronger restrictions on disposing of edible food that could be donated.
Those are his policy proposals. They should not be read as an announcement that a new national disposal prohibition has taken effect.
For farmers, his statement highlights the value of matching production with market requirements and identifying alternative outlets for produce that does not meet a buyer’s specifications. Processing can provide one possible route where the product remains suitable for use.
The commercial and practical questions still need answers: which product is available, where it is, how quickly it must move and who can receive it. The existence of a surplus does not automatically provide the transport or handling capacity to recover it.
A redistribution system already operates
FoodForward SA provides an example of an existing route. In a 4 September account of its work, the organisation reported distributing approximately 20 million kilograms of surplus food during its 2025/26 financial year, with fresh fruit and vegetables making up around 40%.
These are the organisation’s reported operating figures, not an independently audited measurement carried out for this article. They refer to food distributed through its network and are separate from the CSIR’s national loss estimate.
FoodForward SA says it recovers suitable surplus from farmers, manufacturers, retailers and other food businesses, and redistributes it through vetted beneficiary organisations. Its account also identifies farms, packhouses, storage and logistics as places where more recoverable food may be found.
Coordination is part of the infrastructure
In its 6 October World Food Day commentary, FoodForward SA argues that food security involves access, logistics, infrastructure and environmental pressures, as well as production. It calls for food-safety arrangements that support donation and for systems capable of recovering and redistributing suitable food.
That perspective complements the renewed appeal from Volschenk without turning either organisation’s preferred policy into a confirmed government decision. Both place coordination across the supply chain at the centre of the proposed response.
For agricultural businesses, the immediate question is where avoidable losses occur and whether an outlet can be arranged before the product deteriorates. Preventing a loss, finding a commercial secondary market and donating safe surplus are related options, but they serve different circumstances.
The next useful measure of progress is the food successfully retained in the human food supply: what was recovered, how safely it was handled and whether it reached the intended recipients. That requires operating records and follow-through beyond the annual awareness day.