March on banned pesticides

After six years of working on a vineyard outside Cape Town, farmworker Diana Ndleleni, 61, collapsed between the grapevines grown to make wines renowned throughout the world.

Her doctor said she had permanent lung damage he believed was from years of inhaling pesticides sprayed on the grapes. He said she would not work again.

Nearly a year after spending a week in hospital, she joined hundreds of other women marching to demand these pesticides, banned in the European Union (EU), are not imported into South Africa where workers report a range of health issues from rashes, to asthma and even cancer.

“These pesticides are a silent killer,” said Ndleleni in Paarl outside Cape Town, where hundreds of female farmworkers gathered last month to demand an end to toxic pesticide imports.

“I felt very, very sad when I learnt they were banned in other countries, but not here. Why are our lives less important?” she asked in a raspy voice between coughs. She said she had been too sick to work since late last year.

She is part of a collective called Women on Farms Project, a group fighting for the rights of SA’s female farmworkers. The organisation said men and women were affected by pesticides, but as women are more often recruited as seasonal workers, they are not given proper training or personal protective equipment and so were more at risk.

In 2018 and 2019, 140 908 tons of pesticides banned in the EU due to health and environmental risks were exported by EU countries and Britain to Brazil, South Africa, Kenya and others.

The United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights Marcos Orellana said after a visit to SA in August that the EU’s export of banned pesticides “reproduces long-standing racist and colonial patterns of exploitation”.

Farmworkers said doctors often work for the farms and because of this, were unwilling to write reports giving the causes of ailments, despite what they said in person. –