Survey Tracks South Africa Farm Evictions
More workers have been evicted from South African farms since the advent of multiracial democracy in 1994 than in the 10 years before that, according to a new survey presented to parliament Tuesday.
The survey said that 1.7 million people – nearly all uneducated blacks with little knowledge of their legal rights – had been thrown off farms where housing often came with jobs in the past 20 years: 737,114 people between 1984 and 1994; and 942,303 people in the subsequent decade.
The government has tried to improve the plight of farm laborers by enacting legislation on minimum wages and tenancy rights. But the authors of the survey painted a miserable picture of wages and living conditions and said most workers were unaware they had any legal protection.
The government also is trying to buy land from whites to redistribute to nonwhites disadvantaged by apartheid, but says progress toward achieving this goal is too slow because white farmers are demanding inflated prices.
“There is still very much a legacy of apartheid coming through,” said Marc Wegerif, one of the authors of the first comprehensive survey on land eviction since a black-led government came to power in 1994.
“It is a continuation of apartheid geography because black people continue today to be removed from white farms in white areas and end up in black townships,” he told The Associated Press after giving evidence to a parliamentary land affairs committee.
“The efforts at land reform are being undermined through evictions,” said Wegerif, of the Nkuzi Development Association.
AgriSA, which represents farmers, said that because of financial pressure, it is increasingly difficult to pay workers or even adhere to rules for legal evictions.
The government has given priority to land reform and wants previously disadvantaged groups – the black and mixed race communities – to own 30 percent of agricultural land by 2014. According to some estimates, white farmers still own 80 percent of farmland, down from 87 percent in 1994.
Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has indicated the government wants to abandon the willing-buyer, willing-seller principle that has so far shaped the land-reform process. She has warned that if white farmers are not prepared to compromise, they risk popular pressure for land grabs similar to those in neighboring Zimbabwe.
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