South Africa is about 8,500 miles from Michigan.

But it’s home for about 50 agricultural workers in Michiana this summer and some carnival employees at the St. Joseph County Grange Fair last month. 

It is tragic and outrageous that the people who produce the food that we eat in South Africa are those most likely to go hungry. Some people think that this issue can only be resolved by redistributing land. Others think that wages must improve.

The future of farmworkers looks bleak as they face the problems of mechanisation, less available farmland for food production and eviction from farm houses which they’ve occupied for generations.

The immediate equalisation and increase in wages for farmworkers would be unsustainable for the agricultural sector.

As soon as the new national minimum wage was announced, bringing the wages of farmworkers in line with workers in all other sectors with low pay, the agriculture lobby was out in full force to suggest it would lead to huge job losses, shifts away from labour-intensive product lines and generally the sort of catastrophe we can ill afford at this point.