NALSU NEWS: Congratulations to Kanyiso Ntikinca, for obtaining a PhD in (Industrial) Sociology, Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网.
The Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) congratulates Kanyiso for his successful thesis on "Farmers and Farmworkers in the Global Apple Value Chain: A Study of Selected Commercial Apple Farms in the Langkloof Valley of the Eastern Cape, 2018-2022”.
In 2024, South Africa exported almost $487 million worth of apples and is the fifth-largest apple exporter globally. Local apple farms employ 32,397 workers directly, as well as generate export revenue and foster food security. But, like other South African farmers in global agri-food value chains, they operate in a deregulated trade environment dominated by giant global supermarkets.
Before 1994, white commercial farmers benefitted from extensive state support, including access to a vulnerable labour force without legal collective bargaining rights. After 1994, the sector was liberalised, with subsidies withdrawn, while labour, tenure and land reforms were implemented. Now operating in a highly competitive global trade environment, they moved from a powerful bargaining position as sellers to a subordinate position in a global value chain dominated by Northern buyers able to access multiple suppliers.
Caught in this situation, South African commercial farmers have centralised, forming large-scale multi-farm businesses, concentrated capital in extensive facilities and equipment, and reconfigured workforces through measures like casualisation and fragmentation. Traditionally, many farm workers resided on the farms; now, few do.
Kanyiso Ntikinca's study was based on extensive fieldwork in the Langkloof Valley in Kou-kamma Municipality, the Eastern Cape's biggest apple producer and exporter. He challenged the mainstream argument -- embedded in neo-liberal models of free trade and globalisation -- that integration into global value chains translates into inclusive economic and social upgrading for participants from the Global South. He demonstrated that outcomes in the Global Apple Value Chain are far more variegated and largely determined by economic power within the chain.
Policy-makers from the Global South, he argues, need to find ways of reconfiguring the positionality of their participants in global value chains to capture maximum economic and social gains.
Kanyiso Ntikinca is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Industrial Sociology at Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网. He teaches and supervises on Global Value Chains and Development, Social Research and the Sociology of Labour Markets. His research interests are centred around Global Value Chains, Development Studies, Land Reform, Labour Markets and the Sociology of Work.
He is also an associate at the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU), where (in 2013-2014) he was one of the first recipients of a NALSU bursary afforded to Master’s students.
Well done, Kanyiso! We are proud of your accomplishment and wish you the best in your next steps.
ABOUT NALSU: Based in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit (NALSU) at Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 is engaged in policy, research, and workers' education, has a democratic, non-sectarian, non-aligned, and pluralist practice, and active relations with a range of advocacy, labour, and research organisations. We draw strength from our location in a province where the legacy of apartheid and the cheap labour system, and post-apartheid contradictions, are keenly felt. We are named in honour of Dr Neil Hudson Aggett, a union organiser and medical doctor who died in 1982 in an apartheid jail after enduring brutality and torture.
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