Five rand for five litres of wine is the Friday reward for a hard week’s work on a Northern Cape farm. The farmer deducts the money from his workers’ pay packets and there is no limit to the amount of papsakke — thin plastic sacks of often toxic wine — that they can take home.
When a local legal-advice office reported the practice to the Department of Labour, the department declared it legal because the wine comes with the workers’ consent.
Bronwyn Page of the Centre for Rural Legal Studies tells the story, but adds that such obvious examples of the dop system, the illegal practice of giving wine as wages, are fairly unusual.
In May journalist Philip Glasser caused a scandal when he reported on the vestiges of the dop system in the Cape Winelands. His article in the United States News & World Report describing alcohol abuse in the Cape Winelands threw the use of dop as wages into relief.
Government and wine industry sources deny the system exists on the scale that Glasser implies. Chief director of the Western Cape’s Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Agriculture Piet van Rooyen says: “International trade is a brawl with no rules … they could be spreading stories.”
Theo Pegel, executive director of KWV’s producer services, declares: “The media is [sic] overreacting like hell.”
Both cite a 1996 study by the (now dissolved) Rural Foundation that says 1,4% of farmers use wine as part-payment for work. The figure contrasts with the nearly 10% counted in 1995 by university researchers and former nurse Carol Mohamed.
Helgard Wagner of the Western Cape’s Liquor Board goes some way towards explaining the disparities in scale. He says the dop system (outlawed in 1968) seldom exists in its pure form. It has become more sophisticated.
Wagner admits that mutations of the dop system are a new focus for the four-year-old Liquor Board. As yet it has not prosecuted any farmers for using wine as wages, nor for unlicensed selling. At present, there is a new, serious concern about the abuse of farm workers.
A series of urgent meetings is being held between government depart-ments and wine cooperatives. Wagner adds that “Minister [Johan] Gelderblom”, the Western Cape MEC for Agriculture, Tourism and Gambling, “is taking umbrage at what is happening … I have a feeling that I will be getting some [farmers’] names from him soon.”
Up to now the government has skimmed the enforcement issue. While the Liquor Board has had its focus elsewhere, Page says that the labour inspectorate seems to have enough on its plate. “It seems unable to manage, it is limited in the extent that it can do on-site inspections.”
One of the reasons the government has remained off the hook with regard to enforcement is that it is unheard of for workers to lay charges against farmers. Farm workers in the grip of addiction are unlikely to complain, while others fear losing their jobs.
Another factor is the wide acceptance nowadays that enforcement is insufficient to stem the high incidence of alcoholism in the rural areas.
Nosey Pieterse, president of the Black Association for the Wine and Spirit Industry, says the alcohol problem on farms is a result of exclusion. “Farm workers are economically, politically and socially excluded. There is a huge need for development.”
More effective than policing, says Page, is education. “You are never popular when you come in and say, ‘Stop drinking your papsaks‘.” The best-case scenario, she says, is when the community, through workers’ forums, prohibits the farmers from allowing alcohol to be sold on the farms.
So far the wine industry has been charged with most of the responsibility for enforcement and rural empowerment. Van Rooyen, for instance, has no qualms about handing enforcement over to KWV after Glasser named a Koelenhof farmer who deducted the cost of weekly wine from his workers’ pay cheques.
“KWV is the international marketing organisation for the wine industry and it stands to hurt the most.”
Marthinus Saunderson, the director of Devco, the development branch of the Wine Industry Trust (WIT), says he “made a couple of calls” to check that the big wine buyers were no longer buying from the culprit.
“But it is the police’s job to convince someone to lay a charge against the farmer … It is only through business that we can get to him.”
Government support for the efforts of the industry has seemed more moral than material. WIT is a KWV and agriculture department alliance where the department puts up seven of WIT’s 13 trustees and KWV puts up all of the money.
Unfortunately, says Pegel, the government has slackened on its administrative role. National Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Thoko Didiza neglected to appoint new trustees to WIT in the second half of 2000, so for the past year WIT has been a company without directors, paralysing this year’s R30-million for rural empowerment.
Charles Erasmus of the NGO Dop Stop gives the government the benefit of the doubt when it comes to enforcement. “Government can’t be everywhere and be everything.”
He does, however, call for action in the form of funding for Dop Stop, which has enough money to keep going for six months at a time.
Erasmus, like other NGOs working against alcohol abuse, expects help from the wine industry. “It is disgusting that Dop Stop receives no money from the industry.”
Page and Pieterse complain that WIT spends too much on research, and not enough on development.
Pieterse says: “We know a lot. But what are we going to do?”
Saunderson defends WIT, saying that it has spent almost R4,9-million on development since 1999. He mentions projects like Women on Farms, which teaches about women’s rights and the effects of alcohol abuse.
The private sector is not happy to go it alone. “There is a strong need to coordinate development funding, to get together with the Department of Health, say, and the NGOs, to look at what government is funding and supplement their projects,” says Saunderson.
He adds hastily: “This is not to say that Devco will pick up the tab with regard to what is not happening. We don’t want to fund the Department of Health. Why should we?”
Pegel says most of KWV’s approximately 5 000 members — 85% of the country’s wine farmers — are not compelled to take any form of action. Albert Eksteen of KWV says that only a hand-picked fraction of the wine farmers supply KWV’s commercial “leg” and KWV’s ethical authority is limited to these.
The Western Cape’s Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Agriculture seems geared to put some weight behind the law. Gelderblom’s spokesperson, Helene Rossouw, says that the public is encouraged to lodge complaints with the Liquor Board Inspectorate and a new multi-disciplinary task team has been formed to address dop-system violations.