Why removing migrant workers could hurt SA food security

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JEREMY MAGGS: South Africa’s immigration debate is becoming, I think, louder, angrier and more political. But interestingly, there is also a food security question that often gets ignored.

Dr Marc Wegerif, who’s principal investigator at the Centre of Excellence in Food Security, is arguing that migrants are not simply a burden on the economy, many are embedded in our food system, from farms and market to transport, retail and informal trade.

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This raises, I think, a difficult question – if South Africa cracks down on migrant labour without understanding how food actually gets processed and distributed, could the country end up hurting the very people it claims to protect through higher prices, labour shortages and weaker food access?

Marc, a very warm welcome to you and I think this is an important issue, but one that is probably ignored. Do you think that we’re sometimes sold a false story about migrants and the food system in this country?

MARC WEGERIF: Well, often there’s no story or very little said about migrants in the food system. Yet, as you said in your introduction, they do play a very large role. We’ve been doing a lot of research, especially in micro enterprises and the street vendors, market traders and so on.

There are a lot of people from other countries who are playing a key role in that and a key role in often making food more affordable, because we found from our price tracking that, for example, fresh produce is considerably more affordable from your street vendors buying through our municipal markets and so on and directly from farmers than it is in the supermarkets.

It’s accessible because it’s close to where people are living, especially in low-income areas in our townships and our informal settlements.

A lot of the people in that business, not all of them, there are South Africans there as well, but a lot are people coming from other countries.

Right now, I’m standing on a farm, and we were talking to some farmers yesterday, black farmers, and they are extremely worried about the threats to their labour, [many of whom] are coming from other countries in the region.

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So something that you didn’t touch on in the introduction is also their contribution in primary production on farms, whether it’s people from Lesotho, from Mozambique, from Zimbabwe, we have a lot of people who play a very key role in agricultural production, as well as then in the retailing and distribution.

JEREMY MAGGS: Are you able to quantify that last fact? How much of our food supply then actually depends on migrant labour and how big the risk is?

MARC WEGERIF: I wouldn’t want to put quantities on it because we don’t have reliable numbers overall of the total number of migrants employed in the sector and so on. So I’d be reluctant with quantities on it, but we can certainly see a very large role.

I do also want to just clarify that when we’re talking about migrants and people from other countries, many of the people we’re talking about have been here for decades, in some cases, so very much integrated into the society.

We see more integration, for example, in Limpopo and Mpumalanga, you get a lot of people of Mozambican descent who are closely related ethnically and so on with South Africans and long histories of movement backwards and forwards across its borders.

So it’s not always people who’ve just arrived now, and we need to be clear on that, many of these people are integrated into the society.

The other important thing about that is from an economic perspective, they’re not extracting profits at any large scale out of communities.

Often, they’re living in the same communities, which mean they also spend in their communities. When they do employ people, they’re employing people in those communities as well. So there’s a wider economic contribution.

JEREMY MAGGS: We are having this conversation ahead of the 30 June immigration deadline, and I’ve got to wonder, if migrant workers disappeared tomorrow, what would happen first, conceivably? Would it be labour shortage, higher food prices or empty shelves?

MARC WEGERIF: Well, firstly, because I’m in the middle of visiting different farms, the labour shortage is a serious concern. Farmers I spoke to yesterday, and a couple of days before in another area, were definitely [speaking about] the challenges that they’re facing as black farmers, and they’re facing electricity cost and access challenges.

Then the second thing many of them are raising is labour. In the current situation where they’re worried and of course, because of the mobilisation, it’s also even threatening to people who come from other countries who might be here even on a legal basis.

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Because if you have a large number of people mobilising and looking for foreigners and illegally demanding to see identity documents, that becomes a threat to everyone, especially if they have an accent someone thinks is different or, unfortunately, in some cases they have a darker complexion.

So farmers are saying they’re very concerned about the labour loss and some of these are skilled labour, people who’ve been many years on the farms, so they know how to run the irrigation systems, the planting systems and so on.

Then definitely, if our street traders are off the streets tomorrow, people are going to be paying 50% more on average for things like fresh produce as well as probably having to travel further. So that’s a serious impact.

It’s not going to be empty shelves. Our supermarkets are going to have food on the shelves, I think. I don’t want to be overdramatic about it.

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But if a large number of street vendors, and in many cases a large number of them are originally from other countries or descended from people from other countries, and if they’re off the streets tomorrow, people will be paying 50% more for a lot of things.

If spaza shops close down, then that place 100 meters from your house, where you can buy maize at a lower cost than it is in the supermarkets, and then if that’s gone, you’re going to have to travel further, carry your maize further, pay more for it.

That is an immediate impact in a crisis situation already where we have over 60% of the population food insecure. So that is a very serious concern. We need cheaper prices, not higher prices.

JEREMY MAGGS: There is, as you’ve suggested, high dependency here within the value chain. As uncomfortable a question as this sounds, do you think farmers and food businesses rely on migrants because they are skilled or simply because they’re more vulnerable?

MARC WEGERIF: I think it’s a combination. I think there is exploitation of migrant workers because they’re in a vulnerable position and that we should deal with. That’s a labour issue and we should not have extreme exploitation of anyone, South African or from elsewhere. So that should be addressed with better inspection and enforcement of labour laws and so on.

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But there are also skills. People have been doing this for a long time, and people are also coming from other countries where they’ve been farming.

We’ve got to understand that South Africa is now a largely urbanised society, thanks in part to our history of forced removals and so on. Many black South Africans were removed from the land. So having grown up in families of farmers and so on, when you talk to many people working on farms and farmers, they come out of those families.

Then I think we also have to take a step back and look at what happens with migration around the world. It is very common in many countries around the world that people from other countries, migrants, take up particular roles in the economy.

So you can look in America, the dependence on Mexican labour, for example. Zimbabwe has a long history of dependence in their agricultural system on Malawian labour, just as in northern parts of South Africa we also had many Zimbabweans.

So this is not a strange thing for a range of reasons, including the limited opportunities for migrants or particular skills and experience that migrants bring, that migrants would take up particular roles in parts of the economy. This is nothing strange. There’s nothing unique to South Africa.

You can go to another extreme and talk about Silicon Valley and its dependence on migrants from India. So these are quite normal things in an economy.

In many ways I would say we need to embrace them but then manage it in a good way that it does contribute effectively to the economy, that there is skills transfer.

I always want to say, instead of complaining about a spaza shop owner who happens to be from Somalia outcompeting others, learn from them, learn what they’re doing right.

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It’s quite amazing that someone can travel overland from Somalia, arrive here with nothing, set up a business, and outcompete a supermarket group. There’s a lot we can learn from that to diversify our economy as well.

JEREMY MAGGS: Thank you very much indeed. Dr Marc Wegerif, who is principal investigator, Centre of Excellence in Food Security.

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