GOOD Statement by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary General & City of Cape Town Mayoral Candidate
16 October 2026
On World Food Day, GOOD repeats its call for a Basic Income Grant. By the State’s own metric, its R370 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant does not meet its constitutional duty to ensure access for all to sufficient food and social security.
Stats SA set the food poverty line at R868 per person per month (in May 2026 prices). That is the minimum cost of buying enough food to meet basic daily energy needs. That’s nearly R29 per day.
The SRD grant provides R12.30 per day. That’s 43% of the daily need. The grant has not increased since April 2024, and it has been extended to March 2027, without any increase.
To put the R12.30 into context: A standard loaf of Sasko brown bread costs about R15, the cheapest 6-pack of eggs at Shoprite costs R19, and the cheapest available potatoes go for R20 a kilogram.
Besides the inadequacy of the SRD grant quantum, the eligibility for the grant is just as inadequate. To qualify for the SRD grant, beneficiaries must demonstrate a monthly income of less than R624 a month. That figure is, once again, below the State’s own food poverty line.
What it means is that the State considers people who are too poor to buy enough food to feed themselves too rich to qualify for its measly R370 top-up.
According to Stats SA’s General Household Survey 2025, 22% of households reported inadequate or severely inadequate access to food. More than half of all households receive a social grant, and almost a quarter rely on grants as their main source of income.
Grants are therefore the floor of our economy, and the floor sits below the poverty line.
Job growth is not reaching the hungry. The DA-led Western Cape Government says the province created 91,000 jobs in the year to mid-2026 while the country lost jobs. Yet its own figures, drawn from Stats SA data, show hunger rising for two consecutive years. A growing economy and a growing hunger crisis exist side by side.
The share of Western Cape households where someone skipped a meal because there was no money for food rose from 13.4% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2024. That is about 368,000 households. Over the same period, the share of households that ran out of food rose from 12.7% to 15.1%. The province’s own Social Development MEC has acknowledged that one in five households in the Western Cape experience food insecurity.
The same data shows who go hungry. In Western Cape households that depend mainly on grants, 45% reported adults going hungry in the past year. Where the head of the household is unemployed, the figure is 47%. Growth that bypasses the unemployed does not feed them. Adequate income support does.
Section 27 of the Constitution guarantees everyone the right of access to sufficient food and to social security, including appropriate social assistance for those unable to support themselves. The state must take reasonable measures, within its available resources, to progressively realise these rights. A grant frozen at less than half the food poverty line, and renewed one year at a time, is not progressive realisation.
In January 2025, the High Court in Pretoria found key SRD regulations unconstitutional.
It relied on Section 27, ordered the government to plan for progressively increasing the grant’s value, and struck down the R624 threshold. The court found that budget constraints cannot justify regulations designed to reduce the number of eligible people.
Rather than implement that order, the Department of Social Development, SASSA and National Treasury appealed the entire judgment. In the Supreme Court of Appeal, the state argued that the SRD is merely temporary and that the court overstepped its role. A grant that has been extended every year since 2020 is not temporary.
The Department is using public resources to defend, in court, a R370 grant and a R624 threshold that its own statistics agency’s poverty line shows cannot buy enough food.
Media Enquiries: media@forgood.org.za