Take a loaf of bread. The average urban price of a standard white loaf is now just under R20. Of that R20, less than R4 reaches the person who grew the wheat. That is not my number. It is what the CEO of Grain SA told the Human Rights Commissionâs food inquiry on 7 July, when he was called in, as farmers always are, to explain why food is expensive: wheat is less than 20% of the loaf.
The interesting question is not why the farmerâs R4 is so big. It is what happens to the other R16.
Follow the loaf and you will see. At almost every step of its journey, the price picks up a cost that no farmer, miller, baker or retailer chose. Those costs were put there by broken state machinery. And the inquiry into the price of food never called the parts of the state that put them there.
Follow the loaf
Start in the field, or rather, start at the harbour, because about half the wheat we eat is imported. It lands at ports the World Bank ranks among the worst on Earth. Cape Town came last out of 400 ports globally this year. Durban was the worldâs most improved. It improved to 398th. Every day a ship waits outside a broken port is a cost, and that cost gets baked in.
From the harbour, the grain should move inland by rail. Three-quarters of it moves by truck instead, because the rail network cannot carry it, and road haulage costs roughly 150% as much as rail. Baked in.
At the mill and the bakery, the machines run on Eskomâs electricity, at Eskomâs price and Eskomâs reliability. Every generator, every spoiled batch, every peak tariff. Baked in.
By the time the loaf reaches the shelf, it has passed through a handful of millers, a handful of bakers and a handful of retail groups, the most concentrated stretch of the chain. But underneath their margins sits the same layer of state-made cost.
The farmer, meanwhile, operates in the one part of the chain that actually works the way markets are supposed to: thousands of producers, fierce competition, no power to set prices. That is the part that got cross-examined.
The witness list
To be fair to the commission, it did summon the state, and it did not do so gently. Ministers were invited as early as December 2025, subpoenas followed for some, and the commissioners publicly rebuked the ones who dodged. Agriculture appeared. Land reform appeared. Health and education made submissions.
But run your finger down that witness list and notice what it contains: the parts of the state that write food policy. Now notice what it does not contain. Eskom, whose tariffs sit inside every loaf. Transnet, whose failures moved the grain from rail to road. The ports authority, whose harbours the World Bank ranks last on Earth. Nothing in the commissionâs own advisories or the coverage of either round of hearings records any of them being called to account for their share of the price.
The inquiry summoned the state that writes the rules. It never summoned the state that adds the cost.
The stateâs slice
If you think âbroken machineryâ is too strong, look at the two lines on the loafâs cost sheet where the stateâs hand is not hidden at all.
The first is electricity. Until 2007, Eskomâs tariff increases ran below inflation. Then came the inflection. One analysis of Eskom and Stats SA figures puts the cumulative tariff increase since 2007 at more than 1,100%, against total inflation of about 174%. Electricity got roughly six times more expensive in real terms in under 20 years. Every mill and every industrial bakery pays that increase on every unit of power, and every cent of it travels down the chain into the shelf price. That is not a market outcome. That is the bill for a state monopolyâs failures, redirected to everyone who eats.
The second line is stranger. Your R20 white loaf includes VAT. Roughly R2.50 of what you hand over at the till goes straight to the revenue service, because while brown bread is zero-rated, white bread is not. This is not an oversight nobody has considered. In 2018, the expert panel that Treasury itself appointed recommended zero-rating white bread. Treasuryâs answer was to zero-rate white bread flour instead, but not the bread. The state exempts the ingredient and taxes the loaf.
Now hold those two numbers next to each other. The farmer was summoned to a human rights inquiry to account for his R4, a share he earns against drought, input costs and world prices he cannot influence. The stateâs own guaranteed cut of the same loaf is R2.50, collected at the till, risk-free. One of those two parties was on the witness list.
The same broken machine
But notice that the real divide in this story was never farmers versus consumers. Both are standing next to the same broken machine, and both are paying for it. The farmer pays in port delays, trucking costs and power prices running years ahead of inflation. The consumer pays every one of those same costs, passed down the chain into the R16 of the loaf that nobody was asked to explain, plus the stateâs slice on top.
A serious inquiry into the right to food would start there. It would summon Eskom, Transnet and the ports to account for their share of the loaf. It would ask why the stateâs own take from a white loaf never made the agenda. And it would stop mistaking the one functioning part of the food system for the problem.
Because the farmer is just the only face in it. The reason your bread is expensive is standing behind him, and it does not have a face at all. DM