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Information about The South African Wine Initiative

The South African Wine Initiative is an organization that seeks to create global awareness of the exploitation of workers and environmental abuses as they allegedly relate to the South African wine industry and its practices.

Strike-breaking with mechanical harvesters

Until the late 1990s, all grapes in South African vineyards 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 organized strikes in order to negotiate better pay and housing conditions. Mechanical harvesters were originally brought in as a strike-breaking ploy, however vineyard owners quickly saw their economic benefits for the profitablity 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 (1994) thousands of South African workers were left unemployed and homeless.

The dop system

The South African wine industry was also responsible for the "dop system", which involved replacing partial monetary wages for work with payments of wine. This practice is now illegal, but its existence over several hundred years has caused the Western Cape's grape-pickers to suffer the highest rate of Fetal alcohol syndrome in the world. According to Mariette le Roux, some 25,000 FAS children are born in South Africa every year.[1] Research conducted in 2000 put the incidence of FAS in De Aar at 12 percent of the town's residents, some 80 percent of whom are unemployed and poor.[2] The wine industry does not currently carry any responsibility in terms of addressing these issues.

Animal parts in wine

Mechanical harvesters 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 laborers 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.[3]

Cape Dwarf Chameleon

Of particular concern is the decimation of the CITES-protected Cape Dwarf Chameleon population.[4] 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 enviromental rights claim the use of mechanical harvesters is illegal if their use endangers the chameleon.[5]

See also

External links

Citations

1. ^ Alcohol ravages South Africa's children
2. ^ Alcohol ravages South Africa's children
3. ^ South Africa Wine Initiative Website
4. ^ [tva-cee.satfrance.com/cites_base/documents/liste_especes_en.pdf Pdf list of CITES-protected Endangered Species.]
5. ^ South Africa's Wine Industry: A Horror Story
global" and the adverb "globally" are synonyms of worldwide and mean of or relating to or involving the entire world in the general sense or as the planet Earth.
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exploitation" may carry two distinct meanings:
  1. The act of utilizing something for any purpose. In this case, exploit is a synonym for use.
  2. The act of utilizing something in an unjust, cruel or selfish manner for one's own advantage.

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labour (or labor) is a measure of the work done by human beings. It is conventionally contrasted with such other factors of production as land and capital. There are theories which have created a concept called human capital (referring to the skills that workers possess, not
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Environmentalism is a concern for the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and certain land use actions.
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Wine is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermentation of grape juice.[1] The natural chemical balance of grapes is such that they can ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes or other nutrients.
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Industry (from Latin industrius, "diligent, industrious"), is the segment of economy concerned with production of goods. Industry began in its present form during the 1800s, aided by technological advances, and it has continued to develop to this day.
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vineyard 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.
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South African rand
'''Suid-Afrikaanse rand (Afrikaans) '''

50 rand New 5 rand (2004)
ISO 4217 Code ZAR
User(s) Common Monetary Area: Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland
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Strike action, often simply called a strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal by employees to perform work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances.
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Mechanical harvesting of grapes has been one of the major changes in many vineyards in the last third of a century. First introduced commercially in the 1960s, it has been adopted for different reasons in different wine regions.
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Strike action, often simply called a strike, is a work stoppage caused by the mass refusal by employees to perform work. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances.
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machine (derived from the latin machina) is any device that transmits or modifies . In common usage, the meaning is restricted to devices having rigid moving parts that perform or assist in performing some work.
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Apartheid (meaning separate-ness in Afrikaans, cognate to English apart and -hood ) was a system of racial segregation in South Africa from 1948, and was dismantled in a series of negotiations from 1990 to 1993, culminating in democratic elections in
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worldwide view.
Unemployment is the state in which a worker wants, but is unable, to work. The unemployment rate is the number of unemployed workers divided by the total civilian labor force.
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Homelessness is the condition and societal category of people who lack fixed housing, usually because they cannot afford a regular, safe, and adequate shelter. The term "homelessness" may also include people whose primary nighttime residence is in a homeless shelter, in an
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Wine is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermentation of grape juice.[1] The natural chemical balance of grapes is such that they can ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes or other nutrients.
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Wine is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermentation of grape juice.[1] The natural chemical balance of grapes is such that they can ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes or other nutrients.
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The Western Cape is a province in the south west of South Africa. The capital is Cape Town. Prior to 1994, the region that now forms the Western Cape was part of the huge (and now defunct) Cape Province.
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Fetal alcohol syndrome or FAS is a disorder of permanent birth defects that occurs in the offspring of women who drink alcohol during pregnancy. It is unknown whether amount, frequency or timing of alcohol consumption during pregnancy causes a difference in amount of damage
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De Aar is a town in the Northern Cape, South Africa. It has a population of around 27,000 (1996 figures [1]).

The name means "the artery", a reference to its underground water supply.
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Wine is an alcoholic beverage made from the fermentation of grape juice.[1] The natural chemical balance of grapes is such that they can ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes or other nutrients.
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Mechanical harvesting of grapes has been one of the major changes in many vineyards in the last third of a century. First introduced commercially in the 1960s, it has been adopted for different reasons in different wine regions.
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GRAPE, or GRAphics Programming Environment is a software development environment for mathematical visualization, especially differential geometry and continuum mechanics.
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Vines may refer to:
  • a Vine, a plant of genus Vitis (the grape plants) or, by extension, any similar climbing or trailing plant.
  • Banyan VINES, a computer network operating system and the set of computer network protocols it used to talk to client machines on the network.

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Vibration refers to mechanical oscillations about an equilibrium point. The oscillations may be periodic such as the motion of a pendulum or random such as the movement of a tire on a gravel road.

Vibration is occasionally desirable.
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Suction is the creation of a partial vacuum, or region of low pressure. The pressure gradient between this region and the ambient pressure will propel matter toward the low pressure area.
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GRAPE, or GRAphics Programming Environment is a software development environment for mathematical visualization, especially differential geometry and continuum mechanics.
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