Prof Julian May. Image: Ruvan BoshoffNational budgets reveal what governments consider urgent. They are not merely financial statements but developmental declarations, mapping the relationship between policy, priorities, and lived realities. Read through the lens of child well-being, the 2026 Budget Speech is notable not only for what it contains, but for what it barely addresses: food security, nutrition, and the conditions shaping children’s development.
South Africa’s development discourse has long recognised that nutrition is foundational. The evidence is clear: malnutrition in early childhood is not a transient hardship; it is a structural constraint with lifelong consequences for cognition, educational attainment, health, and productivity. The UNICEF Situation Analysis of Children and Adolescents in South Africa (2024) reminds us that child deprivation is deeply intertwined with poverty and unequal access to resources, with undernutrition and dietary imbalance remaining persistent concerns. Behind aggregate growth figures sit biological and developmental processes that determine whether children are able to learn, thrive, participate meaningfully in society, and transition successfully into adulthood.
The Public Expenditure and Institutional Review for Early Childhood Development (PEIR) (2023) sharpens this concern. Its findings are sobering. More than one quarter of South African children under five are stunted and there has been no change since 1993. This is a marker not only of inadequate diets but of systemic failure in the provision of early nutritional support. Stunting is not simply a health indicator; it reflects cumulative deficits in food access, care, health services, and household stability. The review also documents how public expenditure on early nutrition interventions outside social grants and school feeding programmes remains extremely limited and fragmented. In effect, nutrition policy is expected to perform transformative work with marginal and dispersed resources.
Against this backdrop, the Budget Speech’s relative silence is striking. While the protection of the National School Nutrition Programme is critical and commendable, food and nutrition security scarcely feature as central organising themes. There is little sense of a coordinated national strategy linking food systems, price dynamics, child health, and human capability formation. Nutrition appears as a programme category rather than a developmental priority.
This matters because child nutrition sits at the intersection of multiple policy domains. It is influenced by income security, food prices, agricultural systems, infrastructure, public health, and education. Weak outcomes cannot be corrected through isolated interventions. When fiscal narratives prioritise consolidation and growth without equal attention to nutritional foundations, the risk is not simply policy imbalance but intergenerational cost.
Children are uniquely vulnerable to such omissions. Nutritional deprivation in early life cannot be deferred or “recovered” through later policy adjustments. The biological windows governing physical and cognitive development are unforgiving. Inadequate investment today yields diminished capability tomorrow.
Budgets inevitably involve constraint and trade-off. But they also require visibility of consequences. In a country where the data repeatedly highlight malnutrition as a persistent structural challenge, the muted attention afforded to food and nutrition security signals an area for deeper policy integration. In a long view of development planning, evidence shows that the future is shaped as much by what children eat as by what economies produce.
*Professor Julian May is the Director of the DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security (CoE-FS), hosted at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), and co-hosted by the University of Pretoria. He holds the UNESCO Chair in Science and Education for African Food Systems, and serves as a Commissioner with the National Planning Commission, advising government on the country’s long-term development. Professor May is also the Project Leader for the African German Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems and Applied Agricultural and Food Data Science (UKUDLA).
