Background food production
Food issues in the spotlight: peasant murder in Africa
Exploding pork prices in China. Record high onion prices in India. Disruptive bushfires in Australia. They are all events that result in volatile food prices. Boerenbusiness sketches (in the period around Christmas and New Year) in a series of articles the food issues on the different continents. The continent that takes center stage today is Africa, with South Africa in the lead.
The problems in South Africa are not directly related to crop cultivation or livestock farming. It has to do with crime. Farmers in South Africa are being murdered on a large scale. For years.
'Place Murder'
The so-called plaasmoord (plural plaasmoorde) is an African word that literally means hereditary murders. It concerns murders of mainly white farmers in South Africa. Since the abolition of apartheid in 1990, such crimes have become almost the order of the day.
A few numbers in a row. The 2018/2019 crime statistics include a total of 47 farm murders and 41 'incidents'. On average, a farm was attacked every day and a farmer (or even an entire family) was killed almost every week. The farming population in South Africa has shrunk by about half to 2 farmers in the past two decades, partly because many white farmers have emigrated out of fear.
land grab
According to the white farmers, there is a political motivation behind the many murders. For example, reference is made to the corrupt South African ANC government that wants to change the constitution so that they can expropriate land from farmers and then return it to the non-white population. With this form of land expropriation there is no question of financial compensation.
However, it has taken the South African government for years to implement this policy in the constitution. That is why part of the dark population is taking matters into their own hands, or so say the white farmers. The killings and violent robberies are said to be used to deter white farmers. However, the South African government does not want to talk about targeted killings of farmers and speaks of untargeted robbery murders. The white farming population has a different opinion, because robbery murders at the crime scene usually do not take place.
White genocide?
Stories are circulating that farmers have been killed in the most horrific ways. The white farmers therefore speak of a genocide. But according to various media, one cannot really speak of a 'white genocide'. Statistically, a white South African farmer is much less likely to be killed than the average South African.
Between April 1, 2017 and March 31, 2018, a staggering 20.336 murders took place in the country. Of these, 62 were labeled farm murders, which is 'only' 0,3% of the total. This puts the situation in a different light. On the one hand, every murdered farmer is of course 1 too many, but the farmer murders more or less dwarf the total of the murders in South Africa.
Growing media attention
For a long time, relatively little attention was paid to the Plaasmurder in foreign media. Especially if you consider that this topic has been going on since the end of apartheid in 1990. Media attention has been growing again in recent years. In 2015, the film 'Greurgrond' was made, which depicts the impact of the Plaasmurder on the farming community. The documentary Farmlands by a Canadian journalist was also released in 2018, in which she investigated the plaas murder in South Africa.
US President Donald Trump also drew attention to the problem last year. He tweeted in November 2018 that he had commissioned Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, to investigate South Africa's many farm killings. The South African government rejected this allegation, which they said was intended to sow discord.
Jorine Cosse
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