Pretoria - Minister of Social Development Bathabile Dlamini will on Tuesday launch the Food for All Campaign in the North West as part of government's efforts to fight extreme hunger and poverty.
The campaign aims to target malnourished and poverty stricken families and to encourage them about the need to continuously produce, prepare and eat nutritious and healthy food.
Through the campaign, the department seeks to deal with incidents of extreme hunger, which in certain instances result in bad and unfortunate situations, such as the death of four children due to hunger and dehydration at Verdwaal 2 in Itsoseng village, North West.
A team of the department's officials have already been sent to the Ngaka Modiri Molema District Municipality to profile households in the community to assess the extent of food insecurity in a quest to come up with an intervention.
Dlamini will be accompanied by the North West MEC for Social Development, Women, Children and People with Disabilities, Mosetsanagape Mokomele-Mothibi, where about 200 food parcels will be distributed to households in seven identified villages within the district.
She will also visit some of the households who will benefit from the campaign as part of creating awareness on how to prepare nutritious food, as well as on the need for households to prepare food gardens to help the department address problems of malnutrition-related diseases such as kwashiorkor.
"We hope that this campaign will help us root out extreme hunger and poverty in poor families," Dlamini said, adding that the department was happy the families will have a joyous Christmas.
An estimated 21.9% of South African households have inadequate or severely inadequate access to food.
Food access problems were the most serious in North West where 33.3% of households had inadequate or severely inadequate food access, followed by KwaZulu-Natal (26.9%), Northern Cape (26%), Free State (23.6%), Limpopo (20.6%) and Eastern Cape (20.3%).
The campaign will be rolled out in partnership with FoodBank South Africa.
