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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).