Pesticide poisons on farms, poisons in the streets: People’s Tribunal puts government, agrarian feudalism on trial in South Africa

Mar 19, 2025 | News & Media

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Press Release: South African People’s Tribunal on Agrotoxins

For immediate release

 

Pesticide poisons on farms, poisons in the streets: People’s Tribunal puts government, agrarian feudalism on trial in South Africa

People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins to expose big agriculture’s ugly secrets

18 March 2025

On Human Rights weekend, the South African People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins will put the government on trial in the court of public opinion for gross dereliction of its constitutional duties to protect the right to life. Farm workers and community members will share harrowing testimonies. They will attest to how the government has persistently, decade after decade, failed to protect farm workers and their families, and especially children living in low-resource communities in both urban and rural areas from the catastrophic consequence of exposure to highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs). These HHPs include the notorious Terbufos pesticide, implicated in the deaths of primary school children at the end of 2024.

The Tribunal will be adjudicated by a panel of three influential South African women who have remarkable track records in ensuring justice for the voiceless – Judge Navi Pillay, Dr. Sophia Kisting-Cairncross, and Human Rights Commissioner Philile Ntuli.

“It is long overdue that we uncover the ongoing violations of Section 24, Section 27 and Section 28 Constitutional rights of farm workers, farm dwellers and fenceline communities perpetrated by industrial farmers and agrochemicals companies while our govt fails to implement the legal obligations it has undertaken to protect people’s rights. We will end the impunity this sector enjoys as they prioritise profit over people,” says Judge Navi Pillay, Chair of the SAPToA Jury.

The tribunal will take place in the heartland South Africa’s colonial legacy of export agriculture, nestling in the winelands of the Western Cape – Stellenbosch; from the 21st to 23rd of March 2025 the isolation and invisibility of farm workers and dwellers will be broken to expose the slave-like working and living conditions they endure. The hearings will linked by live-stream on 22 & 23 March on YouTube.

South Africa is the largest consumer of agrotoxins in Africa, with over 9,000 toxic chemical compounds registered for use in our chemically based industrial farming, including approximately 192 HHPs – many of which are banned in the European Union.

 “We see a complete regulatory breakdown and a ‘free-for-all’ for the agrochemical industrial complex that is symptomatic of a dismantled and dysfunctional state. It also links back to a long history of extraction and colonisation in South Africa, resulting in gross human rights violations and environmental calamity,” says Haidee Swanby, Coordinator of the People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins.

Farm workers will give testimony at the Tribunal of their lived experience of working in the sacrifice zone of South Africa’s deeply inequitable and toxic wine and fruit farming systems.

“Many farm workers are forced to work with poisons that have been banned in Europe and many countries in the SADC region. It is difficult to live on our wages or access good health care, and when we become too ill to work, we can just be evicted from farms where we have been working and living all our lives,” says Deneco Dube, General Secretary of the Commercial Stevedoring Agriculture and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU).

The judges and the people will also hear testimonies from community members who bore the brunt of the devastation that was unleashed when a chemical warehouse was torched in Cornubia City in KwaZulu-Natal in 2021. This has led to the loss of life, chronic illness, loss of livelihoods, and widespread environmental degradation and pollution. Abject regulatory failure was at the heart of this disaster. Similarly, regulatory failure routinely results in toxins that are restricted for agricultural use in South Africa finding their way into domestic urban settings when people buy ‘street pesticides’ to deal with pest infestations resulting from the chronic lack of service delivery and food systems collapse. Children are most at risk of death, and acute and chronic poisoning from these street pesticides. The Tribunal will hear both community and expert testimonies on these issues.

Expert testimonies will be given by Mr Wisdom Basera, Prof. Leslie London, Prof. Rajen Naidoo, Prof. Saloshni Naidoo, Prof. Andrea Rother, Dr Cindy Stephen and Ms Paola Vigletti.

 “As our turbulent world is plunged into greater chaos, there is also great momentum and impetus amongst us in our collective struggles to reclaim our sovereignty and dignity. For many years, farm worker organisations, unions, civil society, and academics have been calling on the government to phase out HHPs and update our antiquated regulatory framework. This has been done through sharing current science and research, commenting on policy, letters of demand, objections, petitions, protests, and campaigns. Having reached exhaustion of remedies, we decided to host the Tribunal as part of our ongoing and collective solidarity struggles,” says the collective voice of the South African People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins.

The Tribunal hearings will be live-streamed on 22 & 23 March 2025 on YouTube. Full programme available at https://agrotoxinstribunalsa.co.za

Saturday 22 March: 08:30–18:00

  • Opening statement by Special Rapporteur Dr Marcus Orellana (video recording)
  • Affected peoples and expert testimonies

Sunday 23 March: 08:30–13:30

  • Affected peoples and expert testimonies
  • Lunch and closing
  • ends   –

Notes to Editors:

The frontline of exposure is the farm workers and the families living in the vicinity of spraying, including aerial spraying by drones.  Commercial farmers and industry use many agrochemicals that are categorised as HHPs, slated for banning by the international community. Government policy committed to phasing these out, more than 14 years ago, failed to do so. Information on pesticide registration in South Africa is not publicly available, but it is estimated that at least 192 HHPs are still in use in South Africa, over a third of which are banned in the European Union.

Examples include:

  • Mevinphos, linked to neurological defects leading to long-term health complications;
  • Carbofuran, associated with reproductive and developmental defects; and
  • Terbufos, a neurotoxic insecticide recently implicated in the deaths of children in low-resource urban areas. Terbufos is banned in 12 out of 16 countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

For more information and media enquiries contact:

Useful Links:

 

About SAPToA 

Participating organisations:

Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union (CSAAWU), Women on Farms Project (WFP), African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB), groundWork (Friends of the Earth South Africa), South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE), Khanyisa/Kouga Workers Forum, DKA, Rosa Luxemberg Foundation.

 

  • Our network unites civil society organisations, trade unions, and individuals to create a stronger, collective voice against harmful agrochemical practices.
  • We work tirelessly to ensure that farmworkers and affected communities have a platform to share their stories and demand accountability from the system.
  • We provide education and resources to vulnerable communities, equipping them with the tools to advocate for safer agricultural practices and healthier living environments
  • Through research and collaboration, we uncover the dangerous effects of pesticides and agrotoxins on workers, families, and ecosystems across South Africa.
 JURY MEMBERS OF SAPTOA 
 

Chair: Judge Navanethem “Navi” Pillay is a South African jurist who served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. Pillay was the first black woman judge of the High Court of South Africa. She has also served as a judge of the International Criminal Court and President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Her four-year term as High Commissioner for Human Rights began on 1 September 2008 and was extended an additional two years to 2014. In April 2015, Pillay became the 16th President of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty.

 

Commissioner Philile Ntuli is full-time at the South African Human Rights Commission with a focus on women’s relationship with the state. She is particularly interested in exploring how and whether South Africa’s project of democratisation can disrupt historical gendered hierarchies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and English Literature, as well as a post-graduate Diploma on Public Policy Development from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. She further obtained an Honours Degree in Sociology (Gender Studies) and a Master’s Degree in Social Science from the University of Pretoria. Ntuli has also graduated from the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute on the topic of the African Political Economy.

 

Dr Sophie Kisting-Cairncross is the former director of the National Institute for Occupational Health, South Africa and formerly, she led the International Labour Organisation’s global Programme on HIV/Aids and the World of Work. Prior to that, she practiced occupational health and medicine at the University of Cape Town and spent nearly 20 years in public health hospitals in various countries in Africa. She was medical advisor for the Parliamentary Committee coordinating the ground-breaking Parliamentary Asbestos Summit in 1998, with extensive worker and community participation. She is currently working tirelessly toward the prevention and elimination of Tuberculosis (TB) among health workers and miners. She led the team on the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH) position paper on TB among Health Workers, and she represented ICOH at the Africa Union side event on TB prevention during the United Nations General Assembly High level TB meeting in New York, 2018.

Participating experts:

  • Wisdom Basera, a research/clinical scientist at the South African Medical Research Council, with experience in clinical and public health related to environmental exposures, adolescent health and both communicable and non-communicable diseases.
  • Prof Leslie London, the Chair of Public Health Medicine in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He leads research on pesticide hazards and chemical neurotoxicity, farm worker occupational health, and occupational and environmental epidemiology.
  • Prof Rajen Naidoois the head of Occupational and Environmental Health, within the School of Nursing and Public Health at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His research interests are occupational and environmental respiratory diseases and dose response models.
  • Prof Saloshni Naidoois the Head of Public Health Medicine, in the School of Nursing and Public Health in the College of Health Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal. Among her research interests she focuses on healthcare workers and the risk of their work environments, and environmental impacts on women and child health.
  • Prof Andrea Rotheris the Head of the Environmental Health Division and Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at UCT. She is also deputy director of the Centre for Environmental and Occupational Health Research (CEOHR) in the School. She is extensively involved in national and international policy development around reducing chemical and pesticide health and environmental health risks, and leads the development of a FAO guidance document on HHPs.
  • Dr Cindy Stephenis the director of the Poisons Information Centre at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Cape Town. She is also a clinical staff member of the Department of Paediatrics and Child Health at UCT, and contributes to AfriTox, a South African poisons information database, as well as the 24/7 Poisons Information Helpline.
  • Paola Viglettiis currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Cape Town to investigate the impacts of pesticide exposure and socioeconomic factors on child neurodevelopmental outcomes in agricultural communities.
  • Rico Euripidou trained as an Environmental Epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom where he also worked at the toxicology centre. He is the Chemicals and Campaigns Support Coordinator managing strategic alignment of groundWork’s six campaigns. He works on issues of energy, chemicals policy, climate change and public health, all of which are closely interrelated.

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