The South African Wine Initiative is an organisation that seeks to create global awareness of the

exploitation of workers Exploitation of labour (also known as labor) is a concept defined as, in its broadest sense, one agent taking unfair advantage of another agent. It denotes an unjust social relationship based on an asymmetry of power or unequal exchange of value b ...

and environmental abuses as they allegedly relate to the

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring count ...

wine Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from fermented grapes. Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are ...

industry and its practices.

Strike-breaking with mechanical harvesters

Until the late 1990s, all grapes in South African

vineyard A vineyard (; also ) is a plantation of grape-bearing vines, grown mainly for winemaking, but also raisins, table grapes and non-alcoholic grape juice. The science, practice and study of vineyard production is known as viticulture. Vine ...

s were harvested by workers by hand. Workers received low wages, as little as 95 Rands a week, and were housed in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. Workers organised

strikes Strike may refer to: People *Strike (surname) Physical confrontation or removal *Strike (attack), attack with an inanimate object or a part of the human body intended to cause harm *Airstrike, military strike by air forces on either a suspected ...

in order to negotiate better pay and housing conditions.

Mechanical harvesters Mechanised agriculture or agricultural mechanization is the use of machinery and equipment, ranging from simple and basic hand tools to more sophisticated, motorized equipment and machinery, to perform agricultural operations. In modern times, po ...

were originally brought in as a strike-breaking ploy, however vineyard owners quickly saw their economic benefits for the profitability of their businesses. Each machine replaced 200 workers and could be operated by only one driver. As a result of the introduction of these machine during the last year of

Apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

(1994) thousands of South African workers were left unemployed and homeless.

Legacy of the dop system

The South African wine industry was also responsible for the "

dop system The Tot System, also known as the Dop System (after the Afrikaans word 'dop' meaning an alcoholic drink), is a notorious truck system which was used in South African wine farms particularly in the Western Cape. Farm workers would receive payment in ...

", which involved replacing partial monetary wages for work with payments of wine. This practice has been illegal since 1961, but was practised until the end of Apartheid. According to an August 2011

Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human ...

Report, civil society actors assert that "dop" payments continue to a limited extent, but they are having difficulties to document it, as farmworkers are reluctant to discuss it, fearing to lose the "dop" payments. The report documents two farms in the Western Cape that provide farmworkers with wine as partial compensation, and farms giving their workers free wine. The existence of the "dop system" over a long period has caused the

Western Cape The Western Cape is a province of South Africa, situated on the south-western coast of the country. It is the fourth largest of the nine provinces with an area of , and the third most populous, with an estimated 7 million inhabitants in 2020 ...

's grape-pickers to suffer the highest rate of Fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in the world. According to research, some 25,000 FAS children are born in South Africa every year. The wine industry does not currently carry any responsibility in terms of addressing these issues.

Animal parts in wine

are machines that straddle grape vines and through a combination of vibration and suction harvest grapes off the vine. As a consequence of this action, an indeterminate number of insects, reptiles, small mammals and bird's eggs are processed with the grapes as they are turned into wine. Manual labourers claim that since there is no human perception and decision-making in the mechanical reaping process, these creatures end up in a "destalking screw" where their blood and debris contaminates the wine.

Cape Dwarf Chameleon

Of particular concern is the decimation of the Cape Dwarf Chameleon population, a

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species CITES (shorter name for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also known as the Washington Convention) is a multilateral treaty to protect endangered plants and animals from the threats of interna ...

(CITES)-protected species. South African law (ordinance 19 of 1974, 44.1C) states that it is illegal to produce a product with a part of a protected species without the necessary permit. To date the Department of Cape Nature Conservation has issued no such permit to the South African Wine Industry. Thus, advocates for environmental rights claim the use of mechanical harvesters is illegal if their use endangers the chameleon.

References

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