Farm workers march to Parliament to demand major reform
List of demands handed to Minister of Agriculture
Farm workers demanded changes to land distribution and a moratorium on evictions from farms. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
- About 200 farm workers marched to Parliament on Friday to demand agrarian reform.
- The march was organised by the Women on Farms Project (WFP) and the Rural Womenâs Assembly.
- The marchers handed over a memorandum addressed to Minister of Agriculture Thoko Didiza.
- They demanded land redistribution and agrarian reform, a moratorium on farm worker evictions, a ban on hazardous pesticides on farms, and social protection in the form of a basic income grant.
- David Esau, provincial Chief Inspector of the Department of Labour, said that many farm injuries were not reported and employees were coerced into signing illegal contracts.
âWe provide this country with food yet we donât have any food,â a farm worker from the Northern Cape said in front of Parliament in Cape Town on Friday.
Laura Boer has been working on a farm for nearly four years. She said that farm workers barely make the minimum wage. They are landless, and they are constantly facing evictions from farms.
Boer is one of about 200 women living on farms in the Western and Northern Cape who marched to Parliament on Friday 28 October and handed over a memorandum of demands addressed to Thoko Didiza, Minister of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development.
The lengthy memorandum set out demands for land redistribution and agrarian reform, a moratorium on farm worker evictions, a ban on hazardous pesticides on farms, and social protection in the form of a basic income grant.
In the memorandum the workers quoted the Freedom Charter: âIt is still the will of farm workers and dwellers that âThe land shall be shared among those who work it.ââ
The march was organised by the Women on Farms Project (WFP) and the Rural Womenâs Assembly. The memorandum was received by a representative of the presidency. Some of the placards read: âLand = dignified livesâ, âProsecute farmers who violate farm worker rightsâ, and âCourts stop granting eviction ordersâ.
Colette Solomons, director of WFP, said to GroundUp that since the uprisings on farms in 2012, things âhave not improved in the last ten yearsâ in the lives of farm workers. âIn many respects, things are actually deteriorating. Work is more insecure. Evictions are happening at a pace. We can no longer continue being dependent on farmers,â she said.
The protest followed week-long meetings which brought together speakers from trade unions, civic organisations, government departments, and researchers. Topics ranged from illegal farm worker evictions, and landlessness to pesticide exposure, and labour rights violations.
About 200 farm workers marched to Parliament on Friday. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks
Zwelivelile Mandela, Chairperson of Parliamentâs Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, delivered the opening address. Mandela spoke about preliminary findings from farm visits conducted by the committee with the Department of Labour and Employment in the Western Cape earlier this year.
Mandela said that the joint committee heard about how farm workers lacked access to water and electricity. They also heard about illegal evictions, violations of labour rights, and unfair dismissals and retrenchments of farm workers who had worked on farms for decades.
He said these issues must be âurgently addressed as it is central to restorative justice in South Africa⌠Our oversight found some of the worst infringements on the rights of women on farms.â
Esau said that in the Witzenberg, Paarl, and West Coast areas, that 807 out of a total of 2,575 farms were non-compliant. Common issues were that injuries were not reported, employees were coerced into signing illegal contracts, and there was a lack of access to drinking water and ablution facilities.
A resolution dealing with various issues was passed at the end of the meetings and drafted into the memorandum.
Next: Eastern Cape farm families plead for access to electricity and water
Previous: After two years the Ga-Rankuwa to Pretoria train is running again. We tried it
© 2022 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.