Statement rejecting the Draft Regulations for Hazardous Chemical Agents published on 5 April 2024, under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1993 (Act No 85 of 1993)

On 5 May 2024, the Democratic Alliance (DA) staged a protest outside the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) headquarters in Johannesburg. As part of the political party’s labour market reforms, the DA proposed scrapping the National Minimum Wage (NMW) for young, first-time workers, postulating that many unemployed persons would be willing to work for less than the NMW. In addition, they proposed freezing the existing NMW without further increases. The DA argues that an inflexible NMW is an onerous burden on businesses, stifling investment and job creation.

John Steenhuisen, party leader of the DA, promised that should the DA come into power after the May 2024 elections, these labour market reforms would be gradually implemented.On 2 July 2024, over a month after the elections, South Africans woke to the news that as part of the Government of National Unity (GNU), John Steenhuisen had been the appointed Minister of Agriculture and Dr Dion George, the DA’s Federal Finance Chairperson, as the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment.John Steenhuisen’s hostility towards the NMW and the DA’s free market economic policies do not bode well for agricultural workers. It is common knowledge that the DA supports neoliberal, large-scale commercial agriculture. Their free-market ideology will not only entrench the status quo and inherited apartheid patterns of ownership, but actively promote the interests of commercial farmers. Theirs is a policy that prioritises profit over human life, commercial farmers over farm workers, and the monopolisation of land over redistribution.

Steenhuisen and the DA’s election strategy, if implemented, will deepen the poverty and hunger levels of farm workers, as it is common knowledge that it is impossible to sustain decent livelihoods with seasonal worker minimum wages. For this reason, farm workers have for years demanded a living wage. We anticipate the continued casualisation of labour and farm worker evictions, job losses from accelerated mechanisation, and unabated farm worker exposure to high levels of toxic and deadly pesticides.

Regulations regarding appropriate protective clothing when handling chemicals and pesticide are continuously flouted by farmers. Safety measures, such as halting work in a vineyard, orchard or field while, or soon after, pesticides have been sprayed, or not working in adjacent areas, are also disregarded. As one worker from Robertson in the Western Cape reports, “They (the farmers) spray on top of you – here and now. They don’t care!” Farm workers are not even provided with washing facilities at the workplace to deal with pesticide residues on their bodies and clothing, thus taking home such residues to their families. The issue is further compounded by pesticide drift and pesticide residues on crops.

For women farm workers and dwellers, pesticide exposure has specific and graver health consequences. Due to the precarious nature of their seasonal employment and their insecure tenure on farms, farmwomen endure the worst conditions of employment, which includes pesticide exposure coupled with no access to toilets or drinking water during the workday.

This situation will not change due to the tremendous economic power and influence the agriculture industry holds in South Africa, which includes the agrochemical industry, and which is allowed to act with impunity. South Africa’s commercial agricultural sector is predicated on deeply unequal economic and power relations where wealthy white male farmers own the means of production and poor black farm workers only have their cheap labour to barter. These radically asymmetrical power relations have, historically and still today, created a super-exploitable class of workers that have no bargaining power to insist on humane and safe working environments. This disadvantage is further exacerbated by their isolated living conditions in rural areas and on private property, where human rights violations easily go “unseen, unreported, and unpunished”.

During his visit to South Africa in August 2023, Dr Marcos Orellana, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights, noted with deep concern “the extent of the agrochemical industry’s influence on information and standard setting” in the agricultural sector. His findings also exposed the extreme seriousness of toxic pollution in the country, and he exhorted the government to urgently attend to “the legacy of environmental racism [that has externalised the] costs of environmental degradation to the marginalised and poor communities.”

It is on these grounds that this coalition of farm worker trade unions and civil society organisations reject the Draft Regulations for Hazardous Chemical Agents published on 5 April 2024 under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1993 (Act no 85 of 1993). These are our objections and demands to the Department of Employment and Labour:

1. We reject the “notice and comment” procedure, including the requirement that comments be submitted in the prescribed format, as being procedurally unfair in terms of the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act No. 3 of 2000 (“PAJA”). Furthermore, we insist that the Minister and her/his Department are required to hold open and transparent public consultations with farm workers and farm dwellers, and other impacted/adjacent communities, and take into consideration their oral inputs, comments, and concerns vis-à-vis the draft regulations.
2. As civil society and trade unions, we vehemently oppose the notion that regulation, even if properly enforced, can adequately address the long-term health and environmental impacts of chemicals and pesticide exposure. Pesticides are inherently hazardous, and cause harm to the environment and human health. At most, regulation could provide a thin veneer of safety that disguises the highly toxic, dangerous and destructive practices and industry. All pesticides must be banned, but at the barest minimum, we are demanding that the Minister of Agriculture ban, with immediate effect, those highly hazardous pesticides already banned in the EU.

South Africa must embark upon a pesticide-free future. It is incumbent on John Steenhuisen in his capacity as Minister of Agriculture, Dr Dion George in his capacity as Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment, Nomakhosazana Meth as Minister of Employment and Labour, and Mzwanele Nyhontso the Minister of Land Reform and Rural Development, to address the huge economic power imbalances within the agricultural sector, as a systemic response to ensure that farm workers are entitled to a safe work environment and without risk (Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1993) and an environment protected from pollution and ecological degradation (Section 24(b) of the South African Constitution).

Click here to read the joint briefing we submitted.

Contacts

• Women on Farms: Colette Solomon: 072 415 0992, Carmen Louw 082 803 5800, Kara Mackay 082 627 8934
• African Centre for Biodiversity: Mariam Mayet 083 269 4309
• Surplus People’s Project: Vainola Makan 084 098 6942
• South African People’s Tribunal on Agrotoxins: Haidee Swanby 082 459 8548

Other endorsing organisations:

• Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU)
• South African People’s Tribunal on Agrotoxins
• Sovereign Agroecology and Food Empowerment (SAFE)
• Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE)
• Ubuntu Rural Women and Youth
• University of Cape Town School of Public Health