Gertruida Baartman attends Tesco's AGM

British supermarkets are currently exploiting women workers and small scale farmers in poor countries.

Gertruida Baartman, pictured here, is 39 and a single mother with three children. She earns just 38p per hour as a fruit farm labourer. This fruit ends up on Tesco's shelves.

Gertruida courageously came to the UK for the second year in a row to attend this year’s AGM to ask what Tesco is doing about its promise for better pay and working conditions for farm workers that followed her visit in 2006.

In 2006, Gertruida told 600 shareholders and Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy: "I don't get paid enough to feed my children and I have to work with pesticides with my bare hands. I don't get the same wages as other men even if I do the same work."

In response Tesco made a commitment to change the way it audits fruit farms in the country through an independent scheme. Despite this commitment, the lives of the women farm workers have not improved, and many of the problems remain.

"I am here again because things haven’t changed in our lives. Our children still go to bed hungry and we use pesticides with our bare hands." Gertruida Baartman, 2007

Gertruida’s stance against Tesco is not without personal risk to herself. On her return to South Africa in 2006, Gertruida found that her farm refused to re-hire her for the next season: "I lost my job and the union had to fight with the farmer to get my job back... I don’t believe that I will get my job back when I return now."

Since last year, Tesco have committed to independent checks of 150 of the 750 fruit farms in South Africa, to find out more about the problems faced by farmers like Gertruida. What they haven't done is acknowledged that the way that they do business with the farms is part of the reason for poor working conditions.

We will continue to campaign for Tesco to make changes in its own buying practices to ensure real improvements to the lives of women workers like Gertruida in developing countries.

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photo : ©Laura Braun/ActionAid