GroundUp reports that over 200 farmworkers marched to Parliament on Wednesday to hand over a memorandum demanding an immediate moratorium on farm evictions, an urgent meeting with the minister of rural development and a task team to address farm evictions.  

In 2014, then deputy president Cyril Ramaphosa apparently promised a moratorium on farm evictions, but such a promise has yet to be fulfilled.  Organised by the Women on Farms Project, the memorandum claimed that evictions in the broader Cape Winelands and the Drakenstein municipality had become a crisis.  It was said that twenty thousand people were at risk of eviction on Drakenstein farms.  Colette Soloman, director of Women on Farms, said that farmers were still "illegally evicting farmworkers" and at the same time "we see luxury housing developments going up".  "Where must we go?  We are born on farms," said a Simondium farmworker.  An official from the Presidency accepted the memorandum.

• Read the full original of Ashraf Hendricks’ report on the protest at GroundUp

Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page