Food security, as a concept, can be traced back to the mid-1970s when the UN World Food
Conference set up the Committee on World Food Security in 1975. In the early-1980s, the
Committee on World Food Security expanded the debate around food security and adopted
a multi-dimensional concept of food security, which included not only the availability of food
but also access to food and stability around food security. In addition to the Rome
Declaration, mayors and city leaders from all over the world signed the Barcelona
Declaration in 1999, which stated the importance of ensuring access to food by low-income
constituencies in developing countries as a main objective of local development policies and
programmes. Despite this, 794.6 million people around the world, with 232.5 million in Africa
and 220.0 million in sub-Saharan Africa remained undernourished in 2014. Several studies
in the 1990s predicted that the focus on poverty, including food security, would shift to urban
areas, as poor households in urban areas may experience the ever increasing economic and
demographic challenges associated with urbanisation. In South Africa, it is predicted that the
urban population will increase from 30.8 million in 2010 to 38.1 million in 2030, which has led
to food insecurity becoming recognised as an increasingly urban phenomenon. In order to
combat the negative consequences of poverty and food insecurity, the importance of socialprotection
policies in the development policy agendas of many countries has grown, given
that such policies tackle the issues of poverty and food vulnerability directly at the household
level. In this regard, social-security programmes in South Africa have expanded since 1994
to the extent that the number of people receiving social grants increased from 2.4 million in
1989 to 16.7 million in 2015. However, there is still no consensus amongst scholars as to
whether these social transfers should be conditional or unconditional. The on-going evidence
of unacceptable levels of food insecurity in South African urban areas gives rise to the
following questions, namely are social grants adequate to reduce food insecurity, and are
unconditional social grants the most suitable solution for addressing the problem in the
context of increasing levels of urbanisation?