Why Hunger Must Be Named: A Call to Action Ahead of the G20 in Johannesburg

By The Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE)

As South Africa hosts the G20 Summit in Johannesburg this week, the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE), alongside small-scale farmers, fishers, and rural communities, will be present to ensure that rural voices are not sidelined in conversations that shape global priorities. When the world’s most powerful economies gather to discuss finance, agriculture, climate, and development, we must ask: whose realities are being represented, and whose are being erased?

Last year, Brazil’s presidency of the G20 reframed hunger as a global political priority. It challenged the technocratic language of food security and named hunger as a structural outcome of inequality, trade injustice, and climate collapse. Brazil proposed taxing billionaires, launched the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, and linked climate action to social inclusion. It showed that Global South countries can lead with courage and clarity.

South Africa, by contrast, has listed four priorities: disaster risk, debt sustainability, energy transition, and critical minerals. These are important issues, but they remain disconnected from the daily realities of food insecurity and economic exclusion. This year, the Daily Maverick reported that an average of 30 children die from hunger and malnutrition every day, which equates to more than 11,000 preventable deaths each year, while 27 percent of children under five suffer from stunting, a stark indicator of chronic undernutrition.

On World Hunger Day in October 2025, women in the small rural town of McGregor in the Western Cape shared their experiences and struggles related to the Right to Food during a Popular Speak Out organised by the Rural Women’s Assembly. Around 300 women attended, representing diverse sectors such as farmworkers, fisherwomen, small-scale farmers, and rural community members from organisations including Mawubuye Land Rights Movement, Coastal Links, Women on Farms, Cry X, and the CSAAWU farmworkers’ union, joined by young people and students.

Abigail, a farmworker from Robertson, is a seasonal worker employed only three or four days a week, earning R700. “I have four children to feed, and that money must cover food, toiletries, and everything else. It’s really tough. I survive only because of the Child Support Grant.”

Kershia, a fisherwoman, spoke about the unfairness of the fishing quota system. “The quota system has turned us into criminals. We can only fish during certain months, while big trawlers operate all year. When we fish outside our quota, we’re treated like poachers.”

While the G20 is not a legislative body, it sets the tone for how governments respond to global crises. It shapes the language of development and the architecture of finance. In a country where children are dying from malnutrition, the absence of hunger from South Africa’s G20 agenda is significant.

TCOE and its affiliates call on the South African government to center hunger and food sovereignty in its G20 agenda. We call for land access to be recognised not just as a development issue, but as a frontline struggle against poverty. We call for agroecology to be treated not as an alternative, but as a necessity. And we call for climate finance that does not deepen debt, but enables real adaptation for rural communities.

TCOE will be participating in the G20 Social Summit and ‘We the 99% People’s Summit’, where we will be partnering at two events on Thursday, 20 November at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg: ‘Listening to the Seeds’ at 11am, and ‘Stories from the Soil, Local Wisdom for a Changing Climate’ at 2pm.

This is not just a moment for policy critique. It is a moment for political clarity. If Brazil could name hunger, why can’t South Africa?

We invite civil society, media, and policymakers to join us in asking the hard questions:

• Why are small-scale producers excluded from decision-making?
• Why are land rights missing from the conversation?
• Who profits from climate finance tied to debt?
• What does “sustainability” mean when extractive industries dominate the agenda?

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The Trust for Community Outreach and Education is a national organisation that supports a variety of local movements, associations, forums, and labour organisations in rural and peri-urban areas.