Elise's march with farm workers

Yesterday morning I went to a march for farm workers. The protest began at the far end of the city where farmers and allies gathered around a large truck as organizers and participants spoke in Afrikaans over a megaphone expressing their struggles. Through my own background knowledge and the bits of English that I picked up, I know that they are demanding a R150 wage per day instead of the former R65 (recently negotiated up to R105). R65 is less than $10, not to mention they don’t own their land or often have access to the food they grow. Among the signs being held up by the crowd were large red flags for the Food Sovereignty Campaign, a movement for ecologically sustainable and traditional methods of agriculture. The whole march symbolized the congruence of the rights of individual farmers and the issues with the larger system of white-dominant, industrialized agriculture. I’ve looked into this particular issue quite a bit, which is why I was so excited to be there. What I personally found very rewarding was that because I’ve mostly only read about this movement, yesterday I got to see the faces of hundreds of people who actually are affected by it.

Eventually the truck led the marchers through the city, singing and shouting the whole way, until we reached Parliament in order to demand action from the government. When we arrived, the organizers presented a memorandum of the farmer’s demands to a representative of the Minister of Agriculture. It included a broad range of things including increased wages, pension funds, maternity leave, and better opportunities for land ownership. As expected as it was I still found myself disgusted at the lip service the crowd was getting from the representative, claiming that that the Minister supported their cause and was responsible for the progress they have made so far.

Later that evening I had coffee with a woman who is very involved in the farmer’s movement. She gave me a lot of extra insight into what was happening, especially in relation to other protests in South Africa. She explained that when tragedies occur in the mining sector it is a huge deal. But people everyday are suffering and dying due to bad living conditions on farms (pesticide poisoning, for example). What’s worse is that a lot of the youth that should be promoting the rights of farmers do not take much interest in agriculture and a lot of knowledge about indigenous techniques have been lost through the generations due to repressive apartheid laws. Her interest is for growing things to be ‘sexy’ again and to make the story of food mainstream. I hope to see things improve in the near future and for the rights of people growing my food be realized.