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If the word 'proletariat' sounds outdated by today's standards,
it's occurrence dies hard.
All we need to do is go to South Africa to see it in action.
A country which counts 683,000 farm workers.
Agriculture is the country's largest sector but is also the least transparent.
There's a multitude of farms, but who runs them?
Property owners pay farm workers according to the law: 9 Euros a day for low-skilled farm workers.
These farm workers are men and women who live in atrocious conditions.
In their case, 'sub-proletariat' would be a better term.
A report from Eberhard Ruhle, Justus Falk, and Gabriele Eglau.
Workers of the Balmoral farm are angry.
They've stopped working to demand a salary increase.
Cast aside by politicians they're a generation of farm workers
who have lived in a form of semi-slavery.
The end of Apartheid gave way to a free working class who are still poor.
Cape Town is now seeing more and more protests from the working class in recent years.
Organized protests, such as this one being held in Lady Smith.
Alone, you have no chance against the property owners' lawyers.
Without the union's help, you'll lose if you go confront them.
The man who hires these workers pays them 7 Euros per day.
It's two times less than the legal minimum and protests haven't made much of a difference in changing it.
He owns several farms and exports fruit to Europe.
But the 300 who work on this farm have difficulty making ends meet.
It's the first time at this farm that workers are taking things into their own hands.
Enough is enough. We no longer want to take orders and be treated like slaves in these conditions.
You have to listen to our side as well.
The first wave of protests began four months ago in De Doorns, one of the country's largest vineyards.
Workers set fire to crops and were joined by thousands of angry protesters.
The largest farms in Cape Town were shocked by strikes and street protests.
The powerless quickly became angry.
Farm workers have been living in misery for decades despite the end of Apartheid.
The anger was revived by the miners strike in Rustenburg.
Special forces from Cape Town reacted by firing rubber bullets,
killing two people and wounding dozens.
In March, the government increased minimum wage from 6 to 9 Euros a day.
In Citrusdal, a citrus-producing region, farm workers demanded a pay raise.
But many farm owners refuse to apply the new law.
Petrus Brinck attends each protest.
He lives on an orange farm with his wife and two daughters.
Like many farm worker families they live in a modest hut situated on the property owner's land.
One kitchen, one room, no shower or toilet facilities for four people.
His wife Lea works on the farm.
Petrus is a member of a farm workers union.
The farm workers are scared of farm owners
so he gave them a letter to sign renouncing a salary increase.
Only my wife and my sister refused to sign the letter.
All the others signed and have to accept 7 Euros a day.
The farm owner said that our jobs would become seasonal if we didn't sign,
and that he would fire some of us.
My co-workers were afraid, so they signed.
Lea managed to keep her job because her husband is a well-known activist,
and the farm owner doesn't want to get on his bad side.
Like thousands of other farm owners, he refuses to augment the minimum wage,
and refuses to talk about it.
Only the farm owners federation agreed to answer our questions.
The farm owners who can afford it pay a higher salary.
Sometimes, even more than the recent minimum wage increase set by the law.
But others can't afford it.
They can invoke an exception against paying the minimum wage, and there are many that do.
All of this is a legal process that has to be followed.
The farm lobby ended up winning,
and farm owners claiming low profits continue paying miserly salaries.
Petrus Brinck is appalled by the farm owners' behavior.
Their businesses are thriving, yet they continue to complain about higher production costs.
Petrus works on behalf of disadvantaged rural communities
as part of the NGO, Surplus People's Project.
This flourishing farm exports citrus fruit.
Petrus is coming here to meet with workers who have been living here for generations.
The property owner is paying them the new minimum wage,
but he finds ways to cut corners at their expense, like letting their homes degrade.
Kendrick Bosey lives in these homes that have neither toilet facilities nor running water.
His daughter Natalie is physically and mentally disabled because of a farm accident.
When she was young, she was breathing pesticides.
Her lungs became weak.
She suffered an attack at the hospital that left irreversible damage to the left side of her body.
Natalie cannot work and requires constant care.
These types of pesticide accidents happen often in these fields.
Bosey's neighbors have another problem; they've been sleeping in front of their house for over a year.
The house is about to fall down. It can fall at any time.
The wall won't last much longer.
It moves when the wind is strong.
A catastrophe has already happened here.
When this house tumbled down, it happened last year.
Luckily, the children weren't hurt when these big pieces of block came down.
It's been more than six months since this woman and her two daughters have no house.
The property owner, Mouton Citrus, knows about this.
But he's doing nothing to help these people get better houses.
The property owner has 12 farms throughout Citrusdal and is one of the richest owners in the region.
But he refused to answer our questions.
There are about 600,000 farm workers in South Africa that live in deplorable conditions.
Those who don't live on the farms live in shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities.
Their ancestors were expulsed from their lands by whites colonizers over a century ago,
and life has changed little since then.
The great farm reform proposed by the African National Congress has yet to produce any results.
Now, only 5% of land has been restituted to non-whites.
White commercial farm owners don't want to share their land.
They want all the land for themselves
because they export the fruit and make profit.
They don't even want to give land they don't use to those who need it.
Anthony Cloter and Andrise Siantis are some of the few non-white South African farm owners.
With the help of the farm reform they were able to rent communal farmland,
and currently run an organic farm along with cattle and pig livestock.
They roam around, they look everywhere. They don't just eat what we give them.
They look for leaves, things in the ground to eat.
That's why we like to do it.
Andrise worked for years for white farm owners, and for him, Apartheid is alive and present.
They hit me on the head here.
And I was beaten on my back with a stick.
Now, for as long as God wills it, I'm master of my own life.
No one will ever order me around again.
They're their own boss, but like all owners, Andrise and Anthony face difficulties.
Their land rental agreement is about to expire,
and they don't know if it will be renewed.
They've been told to plant wheat in order to obtain subsidies,
and they now have accumulated 25,000 Euros in debt.
They guided us in the wrong direction and I still haven't gotten over it.
They should have known that for small farmers like us, planting wheat is not profitable.
My father used to say that the easy road was not as easy as you think.
And the difficult road is very hard.
So for new farmers like us, it's very hard.
But at least we enjoy what we're doing.
In Cape Town, as in Johannesburg, small farmers are not the government's priority.
It's what TCOE, an NGO that supports farm development, has observed.
Small farmers have no support.
Only NGOs like ours provides support for them.
There is nothing, no budget, no fund.
The money always goes towards large projects. Little is left for small projects.
Embarrassed by their progress, neither the Farm Reform Ministry nor the Agriculture Ministry accepted our request for an interview.
The important thing is for small-scale farmers to have support.
Small farmer owners and farm workers should be able to exploit uncultivated land of the large regional land owners.
And that they have access to water to use it.
An appeal among many that the South African government has been unable to fulfill,
despite Nelson Mandela's election 19 years ago.
That's the end of our show tonight.
Thank you for watching.
Don't forget to visit our website, arte.tv, and click on Reportages.