Cape Town - Farm rights groups say evictions will only stop once laws are properly enforced and farmers are locked up and criminally prosecuted for evicting farmworkers.
Briefing the Western Cape standing committee on Economic Opportunities, Tourism and Agriculture on Wednesday, Professor Ruth Hall from the institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at UWC, said the most effective message to send out to perpetrators was to show there are consequences to breaking the Extension of Security of Tenure Act (ESTA).
“We need a demonstration of the effectiveness of the law so that a farmer does not kick down a door or remove a roof over a family. One farmer going to jail will make quite a difference,” Hall said.
She added that there had not been a single prosecution or conviction for illegal evictions from farms.
While no updated statistics on farm evictions have been done over the past decade, Hall said what they knew was that “hundreds of thousands” of people were being evicted illegally.
Calling for a task team on evictions, Hall said an estimated 940 000 people were evicted from farms in the first 10 years of democracy and that the problem had been allowed to continue.
Hall said what was needed was a co-ordinated response from all spheres of government to engage with farmworkers and their organisations and to intervene where there were threats of evictions.
Women on Farms Project’s Carmen Louw told the committee that the biggest challenge was keeping families from being evicted from farms when “the men either lose their jobs or pass away”.
She said traditionally only men received housing contracts on farms while women were reliant on their fathers, brothers or husbands to get a home or employment on a farm.
“It’s unconstitutional gender bias and we are challenging this,” she said.
Louw said the current trend, particularly after the farmworkers’ strike, was that a worker had to leave a farm within a week after being dismissed. “Workers are not aware that the farmer must follow proper procedures, as listed in ESTA, or that they have time to get other accommodation.”
Cape Argus