Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian

Surika Van Schalkwyk

latest news & developments

Tiger launches new biodegradable plastic

But not everyone is impressed with this eco-friendly gesture, writes Surika van Schalkwyk.

Conditions remain dire in xenophobia camps

More than a month after xenophobic attacks shook Gauteng, feelings of desperation worsen among thousands of foreigners housed at temporary shelters.

Eskom behind ‘diesel use soaring’

Diesel use in South Africa, driven by home generators and the trucking of coal to Eskom power stations

Farmers hobbled by high input costs

Food prices are expected to rise rapidly in the next year because farmers are planting less as input costs escalate.

Throwing convention out the box

The Out of the Box Environmental Education Programme has learners and teachers across the country literally thinking outside the box.

Increase in abandoned babies

Welfare workers are picking up an alarming increase in the number of abandoned babies, seeing in it the effects of growing economic distress — and particularly rocketing food…

Cold comfort for displaced foreigners

It’s freezing cold under a grey sky. Discarded pictures from a child’s colouring book swirl in the wind. A whistle blows and hundreds of people camping at the Jeppe police…

Food vs land reform

Experts say the often chaotic land reform programme has compromised food production: white farmers facing land claims are reluctant to plant crops, while emerging black farmers…

Suffer the wheat farmer

South Africa faces a growing food crisis with declining domestic wheat production threatening to escalate food prices. Critics say the drop is because of a combination of…

Unions act to counter inflation fears

Inflation has broken through the 10% barrier — raising fears that South Africa is entering a period of "cost push inflation" as trade unions warn they intend to ask for…

Disabling bosses

South African employers have short-changed the country’s intellectually impaired by employing only workers with physical disabilities and not intellectual ones. An oversight in…

Closer to equal rights

Surika van Schalkwyk looks into a training programme that aims to protect mentally disabled children from sexual abuse, and says with derogatory language still so recently used…

A culture of drunken driving

Driving drunk can change lives forever, yet many South Africans — perhaps lulled by a lack of effective law enforcement — do it every day.

Tackling HIV in the workplace

Critics estimate that businesses, and thus the country’s economy, are losing millions of rands each year to HIV/Aids. Research shows that between 10% and 40% of the country’s…

Top of the agenda

Poverty is one of the biggest challenges Southern Africa faces. Here many people still live on less than $1 a day. Last August, the Southern African Development Community summit…