This is a serious open letter to the City of Cape Town and to every citizen of the best-ruled province in South Africa.
South Africa, like the rest of the world, is aware of the greatest deadliest plague on our doorsteps and that is food security. There is one product in its various forms that no one can live without and that is food, whether in animal or plantbased.
Allow me to take you back to the period before 1960 when most households cultivated their own food resources or food security. People planted vegetable gardens and sustained themselves and their families. Many had various animals on their residential properties in the form of cows, goats, pigs,chickens, ducks, etc.
People would sell their vegetables and milk and meat and eggs to neighbours and so derived an extra or an only income. Then came complaints that these self-subsisting mini-residential farmers were causing unpleasant animal manure smells and of course flies.
Due to these persistent complaints, the City of Cape Town created draconian by-laws banning all food security projects in residential or middle class neighbourhoods. No one dared to have a so-called farm animal on their own property. The only permissible farm product that was allowed was the planting of vegetables, but this almost became extinct.
The farming of vegetables and animals for food security was now done on the outskirts of the residential areas, on farms which fed supermarkets and other shops with ever- or rather non-stop price increases showing no mercy to the average or poor Capetonian.
And so in 2022, the birth of a new plague came about and that was food security.
The new national meat, the only affordable meat was now chicken necks or chicken feet. There was a small light at the end of the tunnel and that was when we discovered by almost divine intervention that our Department of Agriculture in the Western Cape, under the care of MEC Mr Ivan Meyer, was offering free - let me repeat free food security packages consisting of vegetable seedlings, fertiliser and advice on the planting, tending and harvesting of vegetables. Some households were also provided with chicken houses.
In 2023, before we have curable hunger riots or strikes, we must remember we are Africans, irrespective of race and skin colour, but Africans in Africa and so all by-laws banning animal and vegetable projects in the so-called middle class areas and other areas must be ripped from the the law books and replaced with laws encouraging food security, and providing food or creating incomes in our ever-increasing line of unemployment.
Wasted pieces of open fertile land must be leased to the communities to create food security for one and all. There is no other way, this is the only way and our Department of Agriculture must lead the way ASAP before we have a repeat of the deadly French and Russian Revolutions both started by hunger and lack of food security.
Cape Town must take the lead in this vital project and show the other provinces how we in the Western Cape can put food on the table, which is now so very, very scarce and unaffordable.
Am I dreaming about about it? No, I am not. I am praying it happens now before it’s too late. Let our people feed themselves or create food to feed others.
* Keith Alfred Adolph Blake, Ottery.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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