South Africa’s agricultural labour debate is often driven by heat rather than light. Agri SA COO Jolanda Andrag analyses the country’s farm labour debate, highlighting corporate visa bottlenecks, compliance hurdles, and the case for a sectoral agricultural visa.
South Africa’s argument over migrant farmworkers has generated more heat than light. A closer look at the corporate visa system suggests neither a nationwide labour crisis nor a system working as smoothly as it should. Reform may now offer a chance to fix both the paperwork and the politics.
For a few weeks in the middle of 2026, South Africa’s migrant-labour debate moved abruptly from politics to the farm gate. Demonstrations demanding tougher enforcement of immigration law were followed by reports of foreign workers leaving and farmers struggling to find labour.
In KwaZulu-Natal’s sugar industry and some fruit-growing regions, individual cases were severe, with threats. One cane grower reported losing up to 80% of his cutting workforce.
The national picture is less dramatic. Agriculture employed an estimated 944 000 people in the second quarter of 2026, 39 000 more than a year earlier. Employment fell by only 15 000 from the previous quarter, broadly consistent with seasonal movements. South African farming, in other words, has not suffered a general labour collapse.
SA harvest at risk
But national averages conceal local shortages. Agriculture is peculiarly unforgiving of delays. A crop cannot be harvested three months late. Almost 400 000 of the 840 407 people recorded in agriculture and related services in Statistics South Africa’s 2024 agricultural survey were temporary, casual or seasonal workers. In labour-intensive industries such as fruit and sugar, demand can surge for a few weeks and then disappear.
Workers returning season after season also acquire skills in pruning, shearing, picking, cutting and packing that cannot necessarily be replaced overnight. South Africa’s unemployment rate was 33.6% in the second quarter of 2026, but national unemployment and the availability of suitable workers in a particular place, for a particular crop and during a particular week are different things.
The sensible objective is therefore not a choice between South African and foreign labour. South Africans should receive preference, and employers should abide by labour law. But where a genuine seasonal requirement remains, employers need a predictable legal route for recruiting workers from neighbouring countries.
That is what the corporate-visa system is meant to provide.
Opening the file
A corporate visa permits an employer to recruit a predetermined number of foreign workers. It is not an exemption from South African labour rules.
Applicants must demonstrate that suitable South Africans or permanent residents could not be found after a diligent search, and show compliance with SARS, the Unemployment Insurance Fund and the Compensation Fund. At least 60% of the employer’s permanent staff must be South African citizens or permanent residents.
Following complaints from agricultural employers, AgriSA began engaging the department of employment and labour (DEL) last year already. The department subsequently provided detailed information on applications it handled, allowing individual cases to be examined.
The review produced a useful, if inconvenient, finding: some of what had appeared to be a visa processing problem was actually a compliance problem.
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The schedule reviewed contained 101 employer entries between 2022 and 2026. Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Mozambique accounted for almost all of them, illustrating the extent to which agricultural labour also operates as a regional Southern African market.
Several unsuccessful or delayed applications could be linked to identifiable shortcomings, including UIF, Compensation Fund and occupational health and safety compliance. The 60/40 employment requirement has also proved troublesome in a minority of cases. Several applications being reconsidered or resubmitted refer specifically to it.
That distinction matters. A visa regime should not be judged merely by its approval rate. Some negative recommendations are evidence not of administrative failure but of regulation doing what it is supposed to do. Employers asking permission to recruit foreign workers must first comply with South African labour law.
Yet compliance does not explain everything.
The paper in the pipe
Two administrative problems remain.
The first is traceability. Parts of the DEL process still appear to depend on documents moving manually from provincial structures to the national office in Pretoria. An employer may know that an application has been submitted and a provincial office may have processed it, without either being able to easily establish where the file subsequently sits.
For an industry governed by harvest dates, that is not a minor inconvenience.
The second problem is time. Applications operate within limited processing windows. If a matter is not completed within the relevant period, an applicant may have to resubmit. That is defensible when an employer has delayed proceedings through incomplete documentation. It is harder to justify when an application expires because papers have spent too long inside the administrative system.
A smaller group of cases appears to have progressed through DEL but encountered difficulties later in the home affairs or visa facilitation service process.
None of this is an argument for weaker immigration control. It is an argument for better administration. A legal migration channel that is strict, traceable and predictable makes compliance easier to enforce. An opaque one risks encouraging precisely the behaviour the system is intended to prevent.
The next visa
Here policy is beginning to catch up with practice. The Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection envisages replacing corporate visas with sectoral work visas for specific industries. Agri SA supported this direction in its submission during the consultation process and argued that agriculture is particularly suited to a sector-specific approach.
The case is partly one of information. Labour demand in farming is unusually uneven: it differs by commodity, region and season. A national system built around individual applications can struggle to distinguish a genuine three-month harvesting requirement from a general claim of labour scarcity.
A well-designed agricultural sectoral visa could do better. It could link lawful migration more closely to documented seasonal demand while preserving the requirement that South African workers receive preference. It could also allow government to plan around known labour peaks rather than repeatedly discovering them application by application.
AgriSA has therefore proposed that implementation of an agricultural sectoral visa be expedited as the broader legislative reforms proceed. The organisation has offered to support member awareness, improve coordination across the industry and help develop a consolidated database of sector-specific and seasonal labour requirements. Such data could give government a clearer picture of where, when and for how long foreign labour is actually required.
That would not remove the need for enforcement. Quite the opposite. Employers would still need to comply with labour legislation, and any sectoral system would have to guard against using foreign recruitment to circumvent domestic employment obligations.
But it could make the bargain clearer. Agriculture would provide better evidence of its labour needs; government would provide a lawful route capable of responding to them.
A proactive sectoral approach
For the present system, the immediate tasks are more prosaic. Employers must address the 60/40 requirement, UIF, Compensation Fund and safety obligations. Government, in turn, should make applications traceable from submission to decision and avoid forcing applicants back to the beginning when administrative rather than employer delay causes a deadline to be missed.
There may still be cases where the review has not been captured. Agricultural employers with outstanding corporate-visa applications, unexplained delays or circumstances that do not fit the problems already identified. This can be addressed constructively.
For a farmer watching a harvest window close, the question is how the next system can avoid creating another queue.
- Jolanda Andrag is the chief operating officer at AgriSA. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Food For Mzansi.
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