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RIO+20 SOUTH AFRICA CASE STUDY
South African women leading the “second struggle”
against hunger and discrimination
This year – on the 100th anniversary of the ANC and its fight against apartheid – South African women
are again fighting an injustice blighting their country. Today it’s against hunger and poverty and the
gender discrimination behind it all. But unlike in 1912, South Africa’s women now at least have a
government that is saying the right things to encourage them – even if it lags a long way behind in
real action.
In August last year, President Jacob Zuma proclaimed that the economic emancipation of South
African women was the “second struggle” after their crucial but poorly-recognised role in the fight for
liberation. “Women in our rural villages, townships and settlements must be able to share fully in the
country's wealth,” he said.
It was a prophetic speech. A few months later – to coincide with the UN climate change summit in
Durban – 650 South African women activists hit the international headlines when they marched up to
Zuma’s own door to demand exactly that. They said that the status of rural women in South Africa
as “fourth-class citizens” must stop. In their hands they had a public “Memo” that made the
forensic case to put women’s rights at the heart of a radically new development agenda for South
Africa.
The memo said:
• South African poverty is mainly rural. Half the population of 49m live in the countryside and
71% of them are poor and have the worst access to health, education, power and water in
South Africa.
• Less than a quarter of rural households are now involved in agriculture, which is the lowest
level out of any other developing country in the world because of under-investment in local
agriculture and the rise in mechanized commercial farming.
• 20% of South African households don’t have enough access to food. 30% of children live in
poverty. 60% of South African children who die do so because of malnutrition.
• South Africa ranked down at 110th out of 165 countries in the 2010 human development index
after the country’s indicators fell over five years, mainly because it’s maternal and child
mortality rates worsened.
• Agricultural employment fell by more than half between 2000 and 2007 as more of the farm
labour became casual.
• The government’s land reforms remain behind target and lack direction. Over the past 10
years, only 36% of people who were given redistributed land have been women.
• Most of the 1m workers who were evicted from farms between 1994 and 2007 were women
and children who had lived there for more than 10 years.
“Poverty, unemployment, hunger and disease will continue to persist without (the government)
attending to the plight of rural women,” the protesters said. They demanded among others things
equal rights for women to land, water and natural resources and to decision-making processes, a
massive renewal of support to rural women farmers, and an end to rural and gender-based
discrimination.
They added that South Africa’s environment and its people’s livelihoods were under added threat
because of climate change brought about by unsustainable models of industrial and agricultural
production. They said that “false solutions” designed to create more corporate profit included scheme
such as emissions trading and biofuels that had in turn sparked land and resource grabs.
South African agriculture is very sensitive to climate change, particularly small scale and homestead
food production. Official figures estimate 1.3 million farm units 1 whilst others estimate around 4 million
people are involved in growing their own food. 70% of South Africa’s poor live in rural areas and 61%
of those involved in farming are women 2. .
About 90% of South Africa is sub-arid, semi-arid, or sub-humid. About 10% is desert. Only 14% of the
country is potentially arable, and only one-fifth of that has a “high agricultural potential”. According to a
2009 research paper in the South African Journal of Science, South Africa was about 2% hotter and
6% drier from 1997-2006 than during the 1970s. More than 98% of the country’s surface water and
41% of its groundwater is already being used – 60% of that to irrigation agriculture. “Water use cannot
continue to grow at current rates”, the study said, so farmers will have to rely increasingly on watersaving techniques which will drive up food costs even further.
To South African women activists and small-holder farmers, this science is no longer theoretical, but
real. They struggle now to know for sure what to plant and when. Crop yields are down
because weather patterns are unpredictable. More families are being left with less income and less to
eat. Women find it hard to cope with rising food prices and to care for their families. Farmers are
willing to adapt to these new realities but they can’t properly, because they lack access to money,
credit, markets, land and affordable inputs.
South Africa’s women activists appreciate that solutions need to be political in nature and global in
scope. Local women’s groups organised themselves and seized the moment at the UNFCCC COP17
summit in Durban in 2011. “For the past 16 years ... the voice of grassroots rural communities,
particularly women, has been muted and overshadowed by the corporations with their strong lobby.
As a result, grassroots communities’ environmental, economic, social and cultural rights have
received very little attention on the UNFCCC agenda,” said Constance Mogale, director of Land
Access Movement of Southern Africa (LAMOSA). “For us, being part of COP17 was a major
achievement as the voices of the rural women came out very strongly for the first time in the history of
the climate talks”.
“It was amazing to have a ‘People’s COP’ for once where we could voice our issues. Even though we
have not seen much direct response from the government, we believe that as rural women farmers
we were exposed to the right information about climate change,” said Bongiwe Spofana, a farmer
from Ashton near Cape Town who attended the Durban climate talks. “We got the confidence there to
return home and encourage other women to start their own food gardens to feed their families
because prices are getting extremely high, and since our biggest challenge in the community is
unemployment we’re already struggling to afford food.”
“As we speak,” she said, “the pear trees from my farm did not bear a good crop because it was too
cold and they fell even before they were ripe. If there is one thing I learnt from all the activities around
the COP it is that we women should stand up and do things for ourselves and never depend on
anyone. We should not wait for huge amounts of money that never come, but use what we have
ourselves to generate.”
Today the South African Rural Women’s Assembly is looking forward to having a major presence at
the Rio+20 Earth Summit in order for African women’s voices are heard. There is an added
significance of the event for South Africa in that it also marks “Johannesburg+10”, which many of the
women’s groups were involved in. “Women are the majority in this world, so there is a need to have a
global political platform to voice and document women’s issues – be they to do with land, food
sovereignty, or climate change,” Spofana said.
Ends
Oxfam’s Grow campaign is committed to creating a better future, ensuring food security and
prosperity for all in a resource-constrained world. For more information go to www.oxfam.org/grow
1 http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/natc/snc_south_africa_.pdf
2 M Altman, TGB Hart and PT Jacobs, 2009, Household food security status in South Africa,
Agrekon, Vol 48, No 4 (December 2009).