Gender Justice Summit 2010: Food Insecurity in South Africa

(I apologize again for my slowness here; it's a combination of factors, from depression to work stress - running my own business - to physical disability)

This is a continuing series of reports on the Gender Justice Summit 2010, held in Toronto by Oxfam Canada over the weekend of June 20-21, 2010. To access other posts in the series, click on the label at the bottom of the post.

Saturday morning's large session included a talk by Roseline Presence, Cooperatives Programme Assistant of the Woman on Farms Project, about Food Security, Culture and Gender. Ms. Presence is a former farmworker herself, before she began work as an activist for the WFP. The WFP, by the way, is an explicitly feminist organization.

The focus of the organization's work is on the lives of women farm workers, and the difficulties they're facing from the effects of climate change, farm subsidies in the global North (i.e., most of us reading this), peak oil, racism, sexism, capitalism, substance abuse, and sexual, domestic and work-based violence.

I'll approach each of the above in turn, and explain how Ms. Presence showed its link to the lives of farm workers in South Africa.

Let's start with climate change. Among the immediate effects are that the growing season is changing, as are the crops suitable for the climate, and the fauna damage and diseases that crops can be subject to. The dominos fall from there: drought from the season moving, which takes more land out of useful ranges. The knowledge brought to farming in the area from generations of farmers is fading in usefulness, as the climate shifts.

Farm subsidies are a huge problem for the global south: with subsidized farming in the north, the prices are depressed all over the world for those crops. This means that either other countries subsidize their farmers, or those farmers cannot economically compete. This is a problem when the other countries don't have the monetary resources that the subsidizers do; it can result in local markets in South Africa having higher prices for crops grown within 100 km, than for the same crops imported across the ocean from a subsidizing state.

Peak oil is having an effect in the shift from growing people food to growing vehicle food: so-called "biofuels"* are replacing staple crops in many parts of the world, and contributing to food insecurity - often among the workers on the very farms growing the agrifuel!

I hope few of you need to be told how South Africa's historic racism has hardly been erased. While there may be a lot more non-White people in the government seats, there has been no widespread land reform movement, meaning the same white farmers who held all the land before the end of apartheid mostly still own it now. And they're not in a sharing mood. Obviously, their workers are hardly going to be in a position, making abysmal wages (reports of people making less than 200Rand a week are quite common - this is ~USD26, or ~EUR21), to make offers on the land being held by the large commercial farms.

And the large commercial farms themselves are a big part of the problem. They generally grow GMOs, which are not required to be labelled in South Africa - and in fact, unless you're willing to grow GMOs, you can't get a bank loan for a farm. And of course these GMOs are always sterile, meaning the farmers can't keep the seed, and must re-purchase every year - which again cuts money out of the pockets of farmers.

There have been some tepid attempts at land reform, but they tend to be so hedged-about with conditions - conditions nearly impossible for farm workers to meet, such as high levels of education, and an ability to prove that the land will be worked well - that it leads to what is basically sharecropping.

Sexism becomes obvious when one recognizes that only women who are in hetero relationships are considered for land ownership - meaning a woman who wants to own some land must find a husband. There is a great deal of cultural and racist opposition to women owning land in their own right.

Capitalism plays its part, in that most of the large commercial farms are monocultural (meaning they grow only one crop), and the crops they grow are generally not staple foods, like rice, wheat, or vegetables. They tend to be foods grown for export to the global North: oranges, grapes, palm (for oil), and so on. Monocultural farms exhaust the nutritive quality of the soil fairly quickly (which is why good farmers usually practice crop rotation, growing different crops in succession on a given field), and they're subject to the vagaries of the world market: if every crop in the state is wheat, what do you do when there are bumper crops everywhere, and the price goes through the floor?

Well, in South Africa, what you do is lay off the farm workers. And since they tend to live on the farms they work, this effectively means "make the farm workers and their families homeless". Ponder that the next time you're thinking about buying some South African grapes at the supermarket.

Substance abuse, of course, is a problem in most situations of poverty: people will take whatever brief escape they can find.

I doubt I need to tell an audience of Shakers about the violence that South African women face; it is of the same quality that women everywhere face, sexual and domestic, but it has the appalling additional instance that it happens not infrequently on farms, when farm owners/field bosses feel it is their right to beat the workers for almost any excuse. Domestic violence shouldn't be surprising when we recognize that in order to own land, women need a husband - and that that husband then has an enormous amount of power over her, because if he leaves, she could lose the land.

The Woman on Farms Project is working to solve these issues from the ground up. They are working to set up co-operative and/or communal farms, owned in common by the people working the land, growing staples for local use. They provide education about GMOs, better agricultural practices, and about the workers' human rights. They work to empower local women to take control of their lives and circumstances.

Ms. Presence spoke of one family as an example: a woman leading a household of 10 on a wage of 140 Rand per week (about USD19, or EUR16). She works on a farm which is a supplier for the UK supermarket chain, Tesco.

A further insidious problem is the baby bonus, a grant given to women who have children. In order to achieve that greater financial security, young women are faced with either having babies pretty much as soon as they're able, or starving. Which leads to another generation trapped in a state of poverty, without the resources to escape.

Many of us in the global north spent some effort on tut-tutting and clucking our tongues when Robert Mugabe went after land reform in Zimbabwe in 2000, but I hope I've given you a picture of why those farm workers were so angry about the distribution of arable land, and why they rose up to take it back. The issues are very similar in South Africa, only it held on to apartheid/colonialist rule for much longer than Zimbabwe. I'm not saying Mugabe is a nice person - he's really not - but there's a lot of understanding of why he took on land reform with such anger.

Later on in the day we watched a movie about one community's attempt to reclaim some land, by planting staple crops on it after it sat fallow for decades while the white farm owner refused to allow its use. I'm hoping to find someone who could provide the WFP a place to host that movie online, because it's a really good film and has some really eye-opening stuff in it. It runs about 17 minutes. If you can help me find some (free!) hosting for it, I'd be most grateful; I'd really like to do at least one small concrete thing to help this organization.

* There is a shift in the progressive community from using "biofuel", which carries a certain amount of implied goodness (mm, bio! everything from bio must be good, right?), to using "agrifuel", a somewhat more neutral term.