Fear and loathing in the fertile
Workers in the agricultural and agri-business heartland – and Covid-19 hotspot – fear catching the disease but need the income; stigma stalks the sick; and younger people ignore the virus
If ever a place lived up to its name it’s Ceres in the Western Cape. Ceres is the Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility and showed people how to grow grain and so prevented famine. The Ceres area, which includes Tulbagh, Wolseley and Prince Alfred Hamlet, is renowned for its orchards and most of its A-grade produce is exported. Other products include vegetables, grapes, grain, olives and livestock. In winter, snow falls on the mountains above the Ceres Valley. When it thaws, rivulets refill rivers and replenish underground aquifers feeding the fertile soil.
But it’s these orchids, agri-processing factories and packhouses that have become a transmission hotspot for the coronavirus in Ceres and the Witzenberg local municipality, a long area stretching from the Cederberg mountains in the north to the Ceres Valley in the south.
Outside of Cape Town, the municipality has the highest number of cases of Covid-19 in the Western Cape — 211 as of Wednesday night.
The agriculture sector is deemed an essential sector and continued operating after the lockdown was first introduced.
Early on in the outbreak, the Western Cape government identified the Witzenberg municipality as a hotspot. Health authorities said they had immediately taken action, screening and testing as many people as possible, which resulted in revealing a higher rate of positive cases.
Naomi Betana, a community worker at the Witzenberg Development Centre, said farm and agriculture workers face exposure to the virus on multiple fronts, including travelling to work and at the packhouses and factories.
“Those infections are among workers and are internal transmissions now,” she said. “We are not entirely sure which areas exactly. But we’ve had some factories that were shut down temporarily.”
She said not only are workers at risk at factories but there is also the risk of spreading the virus in the densely populated areas where they live, which offer little opportunity for people to practise physical distancing. It’s a housing problem built on the legacy of apartheid spatial planning, and the failure of current administrations to meet housing needs.
“Most of our factory workers live in condensed residential areas. So the person will come home and there’s about six or seven people in the house. In the backyard, there will be backyard dwellers,” Betana said, adding that one worker who tested positive went home to 13 people. “It is shocking. She wasn’t immediately transferred by the health department to the quarantine site. We had to make calls to get her transported to that site.”
Betana believes the government is failing to meet track-and-trace targets of people who have tested positive. She said that it’s pointless to screen people who may be asymptomatic, which means they could spread the virus where they live. This is disputed by provincial health authorities.
Betana is now part of a call for a total shutdown of the municipality and its industries to curb the spread of the virus. It would mean the agriculture sector would grind to a halt, costing jobs and affecting fruit processing for the domestic and international market.
“I don’t think people must be given the choice of choosing between their health and their livelihoods. Of course, people will choose to earn an income. But why do we force people to make those decisions? It’s especially unfair in a rural area,” she said.
“If Witzenberg is an epicentre here, why are we moving to level three when it gives people more movement
Elands Bay
Citrusdal
Wupperthal and a chance for the virus to spread?”
As the numbers of Covid-19 cases creep higher, the silence of stigma grows louder. People say there is a feeling of embarrassment if you or someone in your family is tested positive.
What’s worse, is that testing positive would mean they’ll be in isolation for at least two weeks. Workers fear it is a fortnight without an income for their family.
“Stigma is rife here. The people who have been tested positive, they don’t want people to know,” said Katinka Koopman of the Ceres Water Justice Coalition.
“Because you can’t see the virus you don’t know who has the virus. People don’t want people to know someone in their family is sick. It’s problematic. Because if we knew who is positive, people could come forward and say, ‘I was in contact with him, or her,’ and then we can get more people isolated and treated.
“Some people in our community have put videos on Facebook to say they have the coronavirus, and I think that’s a good thing.”
The shame of being tested positive and the fear of becoming infected is taking a toll on workers. Betana and Koopman speak of the psychological toll of the outbreak particularly among working-class people.
“People are working in fear. They want to work, have to work. But they also have to think about their health and safety. People who have to go into isolation because they’re awaiting tests don’t get paid,” Koopman said.
But it’s unclear whether lockdown regulations have done much to the spread of the disease in Ceres. Many in the town say younger people do little to socially distance themselves from one another.
Koopman said: “The older people are really scared. You can hear it when they talk. But younger people aren’t taking this thing seriously. Here it looks like a perfectly normal day like it’s no lockdown. The people who work, they don’t want to go because they’re afraid. But they need to earn money.”
The provincial government has confirmed a large number of positive cases have arisen from the agriculture sector. Local organisations say they worry that packhouses will continue to be the epicentres of infection in the municipality.
“I know of people who would come back from work every day and say another person was sent home with coronavirus. They need to close these packhouses for a month. And then we’ll see where most of the infections are,” Koopman said.
But closing the orchards and packhouses for a month would cost wages. As an essential sector, agriculture has continued to contribute to the public purse in tax revenue and keeping the local economy ticking over.