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Cape Crusader: A Fruit Picker From South Africa Reveals The Human Cost of Cheap Food
When Tesco meets on Thursday for its AGM, it will need to answer some tough questions about how it treats people in poor countries. Already, one shareholder has gathered enough support to force a motion calling for the company to open up its supply chains around the world to proper scrutiny.
A second shareholder will be telling the AGM why such scrutiny is desperately needed. Gertruida Baartman, a fruit picker from South Africa's Western Cape, has made the long journey to London for a second year in a row to ask Tesco's bosses why she works in appalling conditions for low wages. At last year's AGM, they promised her, on record, to look into conditions on their South African supplier farms. She will tell them that things are just as bad today as they were a year ago.
I have visited these farms myself, and was frankly shocked at what I saw these women go through.
One of the farms I saw that supplies fruit to Tesco is supposed to be one of the better places to work. We arrived at the shed where 80 women prepare bunches of grapes for export. The women I met work in the shed from 7am to 6pm, with half an hour's break in the morning, two 15-minute breaks and an hour for lunch. Women fruit pickers in South Africa can earn as little as 38 pence an hour.
There was nowhere to sit - neither in the sheds where they stand all day, nor outside where a dusty patch of ground with a corrugated iron lean-to provided the only protection from the sun and rain. There was one working toilet; the other one has been out of order for ages.
Portia Ngxitho works hard here and then moves onto another farm when this labor is over. She only wants to earn enough to feed her children, but the wages are not sufficient.
Jasmine Johannes gives her mother half her money. "I wish I had something to show for ten years work at this farm," she told me.
Marta is a single mother who can only afford to live in someone else's back yard. She's been working on the farm for 12 years but has never been offered any kind of security or protection.
Since the advent of democracy in South Africa, laws have been put in place that should protect these workers; but the reality on the ground belies the legislation. Supermarkets have to take some of the responsibility for this. It is their low-price, unreliable orders and stringent demands from supermarkets that lead to casual labor - keeping people permanently below the bread line.
Ex farm-worker Wendy Pekeur, secretary general of the union Sikhula Sonke now represents many women farm workers. I asked her what she wanted me to tell British consumers.
"Listen, we want poorer kids in Britain to be able to eat nutritious South African apples. There's no request for boycotts and no need to punish consumers, or farmers, or workers. We just need to persuade Tesco and other firms to respect the laws of our country. Goodness knows, they make enough demands about the sizes and shapes of the fruit and vegetables we produce. They have the power to provide minimum wages, not to expose workers to pesticides, to provide proper housing and to pay proper benefits and pensions."
All supermarkets, not just Tesco, want to offer food and clothes as cheaply as possible to their customers. There's nothing wrong with that, but the "pile them high and sell them cheap" strategy has an often tragic human cost. At Tesco's AGM, shareholders will have a chance to meet someone who is paying a high price for her contribution to the company's huge success.
When Gertruida told her story at last year's AGM, many shareholders gave her a standing ovation. This year, they need to vote to do something about it.
We hope shareholders will vote for change for millions of women like Gertruida. But whatever happens, the real challenge now is to look to our government to step in and make a real difference in the lives of millions, by curbing supermarkets' worst excesses overseas. No one doubts Gordon Brown's commitment to fighting poverty. Making our own supermarkets play fair by poor people would be a great place to start.
Emma Thompson is an actor and writer.
© 2007 The Guardian
13 Comments so far
Show AllWith the price of labor and goods in other countries, I often wonder why I can't buy a nice dress shirt for 25 cents. Maybe 25 cents is not completely reasonable, but still somewhere along the line someone is making a huge profit.
WHAT DOES ' AGM' STAND FOR PLEASE ?
Middlemen suck up the money, just like in healthcare. I saw similar situations right here in the USA when I investigated sweatshops for the US Dept of Labor. Women sewing blouses and skirts were paid a piece rate that hadn't changed in ten years or more. We held the sweatshop owner responsible for paying minimum wage, but in truth, the $1 or so that he was getting for each item hadn't changed over time, either. The Sopranos ran the trucking end (a Korean shop owner I knew didn't understand the "protection" the truckers offered until his van blew up) and set those prices. The big discount retailers [Sears, Wal-Mart, etc] called the shots, and we tried to hold them ultimately responsible (remember Kathy Lee bawling that she didn't know she was supporting slave labor? - our doing) but the system was too big. Once we started cracking down some retailers found it simpler to move their operations offshore where US laws didn't apply - that's globalization. Labor is just another commodity to be had cheap.
Here's a guess: Annual General Meeting.
Supermarkets have a minimum markup. Labor and land seem to be dirt-cheap. So who is making the money? It's got to be the middleman, and in this case it seems to be TESCO.
That's the whole thing with globalization is "cheap labor" and sell in high volume at a low price again relying on cheap labor. It's the middleman who makes the money!
These middlemen will pride themselves thinking they are benefiting mankind by employing so many people; but the truth is they are enslaved by "economical slavery". Chances are they were forced to work there because their government was impoverished and global capital took control of their country and its people.
If it can happen here; of course it's happening there! Under such a system we compete to work for the lowest wage, it has nothing to do with TESCO being a rotten apple.
Katherine Anne Porter: "There's no such thing as a good government." Let us, rather, question the basic assumption concerning supermarkets...and the need for such things.
I will not buy fruits and vegetables and meet in the supermarket, preferring the fresh produce, chickens, etc. from the street market. Unlike you superior civilized peoples, I'm able to do this: you ain't. You been told and told and told that fresh stuffs from the street are unhealthy. And you believe it when you go where you can buy from the street.
Unhealthy? Who said so?
Ron is right about the meaning of AGM. But I would like to say that it can also mean avaricious gluttons' meeting.
In the US, we have the same situation: Much of the produce (and flowers) in our supermarkets is produced in Latin America, under slave-labor conditions. Within the US, migrant farm workers are among the poorest of our people.
Even with the relatively cheap prices (due to cheap labor) of fresh produce in this country, these products are still too expensive for poorer Americans to consume in large quantities--and grocery stores in poorer, inner-city neighborhoods usually have poorly stocked produce sections.
Yeah, it's probably true that the "middleman" is making a nice profit, in contrast to farm workers and grocers, but the eagerness to blame the greedy middleman is an evasion.
Our fresh fruits and vegetables shouldn't come from halfway around the world--or even halfway across the country, which amounts to over 1,000 miles in the US. We should be eating produce produced locally. This would mean a return to eating fruits and vegetables in season--no grapes in January. Instead, we would be eating apples in January, at least in the more northerly parts of the US.
Local agricultural cycles are well able to provide year-round produce just about anywhere in the US. (If you want details on this, see Helen and Scott Nearing's "The Good Life.") In this country, in-season local produce is quite affordable at roadside stands. The problem at present is that, here in a heavily agricultural mid-America, few farmers are growing produce for local consumption. There are roadside vendors during the summer months, but they sell only a few types of produce--mostly sweet corn and tomatoes. This is mainly because the vast acreages of farmland in this area are given over to field corn and soybeans, which are shipped out of the area as soon as they are harvested. You literally can't buy a pound of whole soybeans locally, or fresh edamame. The local grocery store doesn't carry locally grown produce of any kind, even though we're in the middle of the farm belt.
Just going local would put an end to much of this exploitation of cheap labor. It's true that local agriculture might still exploit cheap local labor, so we might find that we're addressing the same problem closer to home. And some will argue that such an arrangement simply throws agricultural workers out of work in Africa and Latin America.
Ultimately, the answer is land reform. Every family in the US should have enough land to grow most of their own produce. Every family in Africa and Latin America should have enough land to do the same.
I think this might best be accomplished by creating small villages with large areas of communally owned land--commons--which is the way some ICs are set up. Residential and garden plots, or acreages for larger-scale production, are rented to members of the community for a very nominal fee. Some ICs do it this way, though I suppose others have other arrangements. But the land seems to be invariably owned in common.
This is a radical solution in some ways, but the simplest way to achieve social and economic justice in a world where long-distance shipping of produce--or anything else--may soon cease to be an option, and where more local economies area likely to become the only option. The simplest way to achieve social and economic justice locally is to make sure everyone has access to land.
The haste to blame the "middleman"--however greedy and villainous he may be--arises, I think, largely from a wish to keep our present iniquitous system in place for a bit longer, to evade dealing with the larger systemic problems for a bit longer.
My heart goes out to Gertruida Baartman, and all the countless other slaves out there that do not receive a fair portion for their labour.
I won't ever look at grape juice in a big box store the same again.
We are all "slaves" to the capitalist economy. In America, families work multiple jobs and still cannot afford a decent place to live, food for their families, never mind healthcare. The loss of employment is devastating, and most of us are easily disposed of and replaced if we start costing our employers too much money and cut into their profits (i.e. downsizing). Several years ago, I came across an interesting idea that capitalism and the modern job market are better for business than slavery. When one owned slaves they saw them as an investment and were "required" to feed them and keep them healthy and provide them with shelter because they needed them to be strong to do the hard work that they did. Now, business are required to neither feed you, guarantee you have shelter, or keep you healthy. If you don't work out, there are many others to take your place. We can argue that we can all quit our jobs or leave when we want to, unlike slaves, but can we really without risking our homes, our health, and our future.
It is the same old story. Back in the early "fifties" when I was commercial fishing as a kid, we went to sea, boats lost every year, worked from dawn to nightfall. The price we got for our fish was from eleven to thirty-five cents per pound, depending on the type of salmon. Cod ran from three to six cents.
It is the same old story. Back in the early "fifties" when I was commercial fishing as a kid, we went to sea, boats lost in storms every year, worked from dawn to nightfall. The price we got for our fish from the fish buyer was from $.11 to $.35 cents per pound, depending on the type of salmon. Cod ran from $.03 to $.06. Out of that price came our fuel, our food and replacement fishing gear, plus setting aside enough for maintenance of the boats and winter moorage.
When that same salmon went on sale at the fish markets in Seattle the next day, the price Mom paid was from about $1.50 to $3.75 per pound depending on the type of fish. The cost to the buyer was driving the fish from La Push on the coast to Seattle in his own truck. Somewhere between when we forked the fish onto the buyer's scales and the fish was displayed at the fishmongers shop in Seattle, the price increased by 650% or more. The workers got none of it.
Now, my wife goes to the store and can't afford meat or most vegetables and fruit, let alone fish. Hell, a potato or an onion easily can go for over a dollar each!
The pickers make nothing and the food rots in the stores because of the price. Where does it go? Same place it always does.
Absolutely! It's a national security issue that we need to grow local food instead of being dependant on oil to get it to our doorstep.
Watch the agri-business try to put a stop to this by lobbying government.