A Deepening Divide in the Countryside: Restructuring and Rural Livelihoods in the South African Wine Industry*

Abstract

The article reviews research on change in the South African wine industry, and links the sociology of farming styles and paternalism in Western Cape farm labour relations to work on globalisation and international agro-food restructuring. It argues that livelihoods on wine farms in the Western Cape have been shaped by a ‘triple transition’ involving local industry deregulation, international agro-food integration and the politics of democratisation and legal reform. The article traces some of the dynamics of these trends, and argues that they have encouraged the development of a double divide: firstly, between wine makers who are able to profit from the opportunities offered by international expansion and those who are not, and secondly, between ‘core’ workers and those thrown out by casualisation and externalisation. This new landscape creates challenges and questions that cannot be addressed within the frameworks developed in the labour struggles of the 1980s and 1990s; instead, addressing farm workers' problems will require a much more broadly based approach to pro-poor policies and citizen empowerment.