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SA poverty lines rise faster than inflation

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The Food Poverty Line in SA is rising too quickly. Picture: Riccardo Lennart Niels Mayer
The Food Poverty Line in SA is rising too quickly. Picture: Riccardo Lennart Niels Mayer

Stats SA reports that poverty is rising by more than double the inflation rate

South Africa’s semiofficial poverty lines are rising far faster than official inflation or the value of social grants, inevitably dragging more people into officially acknowledged poverty.

According to Statistics South Africa (StatsSA), the so-called food poverty line (FPL) rose by 12.9% from last year, more than double the official rate of inflation, and also more than double the budgeted increase in grants.

This reflects an increase of the estimated cost of the basic foods people need to buy to meet the 2 100 calorie-a-day threshold that South Africa and many other countries use as a measure of extreme poverty.

This hike, from R441 to R498 per person per month, is a result of the extraordinary food price inflation caused by the recent drought.

The annual increase of the FPL is, however, almost always far in excess of the official inflation rate (see graphic).


StatsSA has provided City Press with the most recent inflation adjustments of the country’s three poverty lines. The FPL is the lowest one, marking the point at which someone cannot buy the calories they need to live.

According to StatsSA, this line rose from R335 in March 2011 to R498 in April this year. That’s a 49% increase, compared with the 30% increase in the child-support grant over the same period.

The old-age state pension, the mainstay of poverty alleviation, rose by 32% over the same period.

The top poverty line is called the upper bound poverty line.

It represents the money spent per month by people who spend exactly the FPL on food, and it is meant to show what people need to cater for their basic food and non-food needs.

It also shot up this year, rising 8.6% from R992 a month to R1 077 a month as of April.

This increase is also higher than the official inflation rate, which is about 6.3% this year.

The upper bound poverty line rose by 38% over the period.

Poverty lines get crossed

The Stats SA poverty lines are not “official” poverty lines, but are used by government for policy making and progress reporting. The National Development Plan sets its targets using them. Stats SA’s new Community Survey released recently uses the food poverty line to gauge poverty levels in all of South Africa’s municipalities.

Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini seems confused about what South Africa’s poverty lines are. In an answer to a parliamentary question last month, and again in a later press release, she cited an outdated figure of R753, when the actual number is R1 077.

Dlamini’s figure comes from a discontinued series of poverty lines that were replaced last year with a more up-to-date set based on newer surveys. Even then, she used the old 2014 value of the old series, though Stats SA was able to rapidly adjust that for inflation at City Press’ request.

The minister was responding to an attack from the DA about the low increases of social grants this year. The opposition party had asked her, in a parliamentary question, whether she thought the grants were enough for a poor person to live on and if this year’s increases were enough.

Dlamini responded by saying that, apart from the child-support grant, the state grants were all higher than the upper bound poverty line. She cited the old R753 poverty line as proof. This led the DA to launch a campaign against Dlamini, accusing her of saying that people can live on R753 a month.

The department criticised the DA’s “disingenuous” campaign and pointed out that the opposition party’s own policy position has traditionally been against extensions of the grant system. When asked by City Press what the DA would propose instead of the current social grants, the party’s shadow minister for social development, Bridget Masango, said that they were “still developing our policy on the issue”.

The department did not respond to repeated queries over two weeks.


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