South African agriculture minister clashes with farmers

Clare Nullis

STELLENBOSCH, South Africa — The bucolic valleys that produce South Africa’s best wines are also producing tension, with white farmers accused of forcing black workers from their homes.

Agriculture Minister Lulu Xingwana has also accused farmers of abusing and intimidating workers. Incensed landowners say Xingwana’s allegations are exaggerated and risk stoking violence on farms, complicating the delicate path toward land reform.

The problems are not confined to the rolling vineyards and fruit farms of the Western Cape, but are also evident in the vast game and cereal farms elsewhere in the country.

“For a long time the issue of evictions and violations of workers’ rights has not been on the agenda,” Xingwana said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“We must come up with a strategy to stop the evictions” she said were taking place “every day in every corner of our country.”

A 2005 survey estimated that between 1994 and 2004, 942,303 people were evicted from their homes on farms — which are often part of their employment package — compared to 737,114 the previous decade. Some 2.9 million people worked on farms and 950,000 lived on them, it estimated.

Unlike in neighboring Zimbabwe, where white owners have been forced off the land by the government, in South Africa it is usually poor, illiterate blacks.

An example is Martha Jonga, a 62-year-old who worked for 40 years on a grape farm in De Doorns, a small village about 75 miles from Cape Town. In January, she says, she was given a week’s notice to quit the three-room cottage she shared with her two grandchildren and move into a damp one-room shack near a dam.

“I feel very bad because I want to stay in my own home,” she told a meeting of rural women attended by Xingwana on a wine estate near Stellenbosch.

Annelize Crosby, parliamentary liaison officer with AgriSA, the main commercial farmers union, says people like Jonga are entitled to stay in their homes as long-term occupiers. She says AgriSA tells all its members to abide by the law.

But farmers point out that in a world of cutthroat competition, the cost of housing retired or sick workers is often prohibitive.

The Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) blames many of the evictions on the trend toward turning farms into luxurious golf estates, safari lodges and tourist accommodation in preparation for the 2010 World Cup.

“Ruthless, apartheid-era employers treat them [farm workers] little better than slaves, exploiting their labor for poverty wages and then throwing them out of their homes when they make demands for basic rights and a living wage,” said labor union spokesman Patrick Craven.

The labor union has welcomed Xingwana’s pledges to tackle abuses.

But Crosby said AgriSA was upset about Xingwana’s “vague and unsubstantiated allegations.”

“We feel the allegations are causing friction and giving farmers a bad name, which is unwarranted,” Crosby said.

AgriSA leaders — as well as black farmers — met with the minister last Wednesday to try to smooth over their differences. Farmers said their “unsatisfactory relationship” was inflicting great damage on the sector.

Xingwana told them that she had never intended to accuse all farmers and believed that the “majority of the agricultural sector adhere to good farming practices,” a statement said.

“However, the minister reiterated that there were still human rights abuses at the farms,” and it was her duty to speak out about them, it said.

In the AP interview, Xingwana reeled off examples she believes illustrate the mind set of farmers: The farmer who escaped with a fine and suspended sentence for shooting dead an 11 year-old-boy he claimed he mistook for a rabid dog; a farmer who shot a worker and said he thought it was a baboon; and the notorious case of a farmer who threw a former laborer alive into a lion breeding enclosure.

“I cannot apologize for the truth,” said Xingwana who took over the land affairs portfolio last year and earned a reputation for her outspokenness at the minerals and energy department when she slammed “lily white” mining companies.

Farmers point out that they, too, are victims of violence.

Since 1991, there have been more than 9,600 attacks against farmers, including 1,560 murders, according to statistics collected by AgriSA. South Africa has one of the world’s highest overall murder rates, with about 50 people murdered per day, and farmers say they feel particularly vulnerable because they often live in isolated areas.

The tension over land may be adding to their insecurity.

Kenneth Eva, a manager on a fruit farm in KwaZulu-Natal, was bludgeoned to death last month as he delivered an ultimatum to 250 black “squatters” to leave the land. They had refused, saying it did not rightfully belong to the white owner.

Another farm manager, Desmond Sterley, was found dead with a single bullet in the back of his head on a stud farm near Worcester 75 miles from Cape Town last week.

COSATU, the labor union, says such incidents are understandable given the daily humiliation inflicted on farm laborers and the snail’s pace of land reform.

At the rural women’s conference, Xingwana was applauded when she said she wanted to see black women owning the ostrich and wine farms that punctuate the landscape in the Western Cape.

“We have always done the work over centuries as slaves in our mother countries. We must take charge of our destiny, we must take control of our lands,” she declared.

White farmers still own an estimated 80 percent of South African farmland, down from 87 percent in 1994. But most analysts agree that the government will have an uphill struggle to achieve its target for black and mixed-race communities to own 30 percent of agricultural land by 2014.

In the Western Cape, it has taken 10 years to redistribute 210,035 acres of land, according to Fatima Shabodien of the Women on Farms Program, which lobbies on behalf of the rural poor.

To meet the 30 percent target, authorities will have to increase this to 123,550 acres per year, she says.

Shabodien and other activists say that if farmers are not prepared to compromise, they risk popular pressure for land grabs similar to those in neighboring Zimbabwe.

“Black South Africans have been too humble in the past,” she said. “Farmers don’t seem to realize that they are painting themselves in a corner. They are not giving farm workers options.”

(Associated Press)