New South African Review 4. Devan Pillay

employment and large-scale corporate control of the food system. Access to supermarkets may seem to be an easy way of ensuring food security for South Africans but we bind ourselves into a ‘reverse Fordism’ where cheap food is necessary because wages are so low (Collins 2009). Numsa and Fawu have recently launched a campaign to transform the agro-food system in South Africa, emphasising food security by focusing on ownership and inequality throughout the food sector. Low-wage food retail workers could contribute to this campaign. These efforts provoke hard questions about how the labour movement is organised by sector and employer in South Africa.

      Corporate food retailers have been portrayed as the guardians of quality, the champions of reducing inefficiencies in the chain, the advocates for smallholder development, and our compatriots who bring us cheaper food; but if Wal-Mart’s entry tells us anything it is that the public debate over the Tribunal process has had no effect on the relations of inequality structuring South Africa’s food system based on a low-wage, racist labour regime. In accepting Wal-Mart as our fellow ‘citizen’, we may find choice in supermarket aisles, but we ultimately continue to reinforce a development agenda which reproduces poor quality jobs, excludes vast numbers of people from active economic participation, and offers little by way of food security.

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