Investigating the contribution and effect of cash transfers to household food security of rural smallholder farmers in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa

Abstract

Shocks such as Covid-19 pandemic and natural disasters erode the resilience of many poor households against hunger by further threatening productive capacities. It is projected that over 690 million people around the world went hungry in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic is increasing the vulnerabilities and insufficiencies of global food systems. Food security is a human right and the government of South Africa is legally bound by the constitution to ensure food security for all. However, food insecurity in the country is owing to insufficient access to food because of structural poverty and inequality dynamics with a strong racial footprint rather than a shortage of food. Additionally, the rising cost of living, limited investment in agricultural development, and high dependency ratios especially in low-income households are some of the factors contributing to food insecurity in the country. Consequently, household-level food security is a major challenge to the South African government and policymakers. The government has strong social and economic rights commitments in place to achieve this goal and improve the lives of rural communities that are dependent on agriculture as a source of livelihood. Using household survey data, the study seeks to investigate the role played by cash transfers on household productive capacities and food security status within the context of a small pace of transition from homestead to irrigated farming in the former homelands of the Eastern Cape Province. The lower bound poverty line of R 758 (on average $57 USD), was used to determine household food security status. Simple random sampling was employed to select 158 respondents. The propensity score matching method was employed using the Nearest Neighbour and Kernel matching techniques to estimate the treatment effects and compare the outcomes of participation in irrigation farming and receipts of cash transfers in comparison with the non-irrigators. Both matching methods revealed that irrigation farming enhanced the per capita food expenditure by at least ZAR 2 738.88 and ZAR 2 790.37, which then improves household food security. The findings also revealed that cash transfers increase the farmers’ production activities by ZAR 1 467.90 and ZAR 1 478.00. Evidently, the cash transfers necessitate the purchase of more and improved production inputs and access to climate-smart practices such as irrigation, which then improves irrigators’ production capacities and, as a result, reduces vulnerability and improves livelihoods and food security.