Women on Farms Project led a march to Parliament on Wednesday, calling on the Minister of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development to meet with them.
- The Women on Farms Project marched to Parliament on Wednesday calling for a meeting with the Minister of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development.
- But the Department of Agriculture says it has received no invitation to meet and there are district and labour offices to deal with farm worker issues.
- The march followed several sessions at the National Farm Worker Platform event this week, where issues of food security, land redistribution, and pesticides were discussed.
About 100 women farm workers and people living on farms marched to Parliament on Wednesday, calling for a meeting with Minister of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development Thoko Didiza. They wish to discuss issues of food security, land redistribution and agriculture.
The march, organised by the Women on Farms Project (WFP), followed a three-day convention of the National Farm Worker Platform, where various parties discussed farming issues.
Other organisations involved included the Rural Women’s Assembly, the Casual Workers Advice Office, and trade unions.
WFP director Colette Solomon said the organisation had tried to organise a meeting with the minister, but Didiza had never responded to any invitation.
WFP had marched to Parliament last year as well and handed over a memorandum to the minister.
Solomon said Didiza responded to the memorandum but much was deflected to other departments. Issues included problems with the current food system, pesticide exposure for workers on farms, and hunger – every issues that reside with the minister.
On Wednesday, the women handed over another memorandum at Parliament calling for a meeting with the minister, for equitable land redistribution that prioritises rural women, ensuring the phasing out of hazardous pesticides, and transformation of the food system toward more sustainable food production and access to quality food.
The memorandum was received and signed by a representative of the National Assembly who said they would ensure it gets to the minister.
Solomon told the crowd that the minister “disrespected” farm women by not even sending a staff member to receive the memorandum.
Solomon said that farm women are telling the minister she is “accountable to us and you maintain a duty and responsibility to approach meet with us”.
“Despite progressive labour and tenure legislation introduced in a democratic South Africa, farm workers remain needy, marginalised, and vulnerable … Women farm workers and dwellers remain landless, experience evictions, and earn low wages for the increasingly precarious and insecure seasonal work they carry out on the farms,” the memorandum states.
“The greatest indictment is that the majority of the farm workers who produce the country’s food … often disappear hungry”.
Speaking outside Parliament, after reading the memorandum aloud, farm worker Laura Boer said that farm workers “just acquire dismissed”. “How many memorandums? How many?” she asked.
Boer, who works in a Northern Cape factory exporting grapes and raisins, said that people worked in needy circumstances on the farm. She said that women had to walk far to fetch water from the river and that they are exposed to pesticide powder on the grapevines.
Department of Agriculture spokesperson Reggie Ngcobo denied that Didiza has received any invitation for a meeting with WFP.
The Department of Agriculture’s full response was: “The Ministry has not received any invitation for a meeting. Secondly the department has offices in the districts in the Western Cape that deal with amongst others land issues, farm workers, farm dwellers etc. WFP is aware of these offices. Above that there is the Department of Employment and Labour that deals with inspections on farms and conditions of employment which again WFP is aware of. I am clarifying this so that WFP and yourselves are aware that there [are] dedicated government services to deal with issues that affect workers irrespective of the sector they advance from.”
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Liquid Death
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an dilapidated man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d sprint the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to acquire abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would guide to a painful death. Dinky by dinky, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still acquire yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t every sinful. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful location to recede on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could procure one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually gain a few more years to indulge in life to the fullest and see the world in every its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a plot with a modern mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn every the ways to prepare the milk, and just delight in the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in Recent Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Carry out you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to acquire a single glass? I execute. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very terminate of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had advance to an conclude, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Dancing Madman
My teacher pointed at me with her ruler and said that at the terminate of this ruler is a dumb. Then I asked which cease and I got a detention.