Melons maketh money

Last Friday I spotted a melon in my fridge.

Truth be told, it wasn't a melon but half a melon, neatly wrapped in cellophane. It had the gloopy bits scooped out. The packaging proclaimed it cost R19.99. Wife had bought it from that extravagantly expensive retail chain, the one I previously wrote unkindly about after it pinched an entrepreneur's ginger beer idea. I do wish Wife would stop shopping there. I like a couple of nice, big melons as much as the next man but, really, R20 for half a melon in season? The next morning I went to see what Manny, the local greengrocer, was charging for his melons.

He charges the same: R19.99, but for that price you get the whole melon. You just have to go to all the trouble of cutting it in half and scooping out the gloopy bits yourself.

Later on Saturday I bumped into Jaco, the boss of RSA Market Agents, a fruit and veg business. He was about to go off to the Johannesburg Fresh Produce Market because his company's staff were having their year-end party on the market's trading floor. It started at 11am. I thought this was a funny time to be having a company knees-up, but Jaco explained it had to do with the fact that this was the only time of the week that day and night shifts could all attend.

He told me what a jol the parties were and regaled me with the fare on offer: steak and wors and chicken plus mountains of pap and vats of chakalaka sauce. And he told me how it got wolfed down along with hectolitres of lager and Sparletta Creme Soda. I had to chuckle: I'd imagined that for their Christmas party fresh produce workers would be offered a choice of French or Greek salads, maybe a baked potato with fresh broccoli and haricot beans on the side. It seems not.

Before he went off to the party I asked Jaco about the market price for a sweet melon. He phoned somebody, a colleague I presume, called Charl, who told him sweet melons were selling for R60 per box of six. This was for the finest melons, from a farmer whose name Jaco mentioned but that meant nothing to me. The farm was near a place called Waterpoort that I had also never heard of, in Limpopo.

Jaco started telling me about how this particular farm had the most ideal soil and climatic conditions for growing world-class melons, about how the soil wasn't too clayey and so on - more information than I needed. I was impressed though. "You really know your oats," I told Jacob. I was quite pleased with this little quip but quickly changed the subject in case Jaco really did know all about oats.

The price of melons, Jaco told me, had come right down in recent days as the market became flooded with the things. Right now the markets were getting melons from Limpopo and the Northern Cape. Western Cape melons would become available a little later - if, that is, rioting farm-workers didn't stomp them all into mush. That morning I read in the paper about a farmer who had to hire two security guards to provide round-the-clock protection for a single non-striking worker, a tractor driver. We always knew farmworkers were not exactly in the same bracket as rocket scientists or ANC cadres playing executive mayor, but most of us were unpleasantly surprised to learn many of them were earning a pitiful R70 a day.

Yet farmers are insisting they can't afford to pay much more. They also insist that is the minimum and that many farmers pay much more, as well as providing housing and utilities. I don't for a moment believe that inequality is the greatest threat facing the economy. The objective reality of poverty is much more of a challenge than how the poor perceive their relative deprivation. But there really is something wrong when a farmworker's backbreaking daily toil is worth the retail price of two melons. Somebody somewhere is making a crazy profit.