On June 12 2008, Edward Dzeka, area officer for the General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (GAPWUZ) and Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), was picked up by suspected militia thugs of the ruling party ZANU (PF) and transported to what is described as a torture center near the town of Chegutu.

The participants of the sugar network from the Agricultural,Civil Construction,Textile,Food and Beverages sectors of the Southern Region representing Mozambique,South Africa,Zambia,Zimbabwe,held their meeting on the 24-25 July 2007 in Maputo (Mozambique).

June 12 has been designated the World Day Against Child Labour (WDACL) since 2003. This year, in recognition of the fact that little or no progress has been made in eliminating child labour in agriculture, the sector accounting for the largest share of child workers, agriculture is the focus of the World Day. Last year's International Labour Conference concluded that, in the words of the ILO, "Unless a concerted effort is applied to reducing child labour in agriculture, it will be impossible to achieve the ILO goal of elimination of all worst forms of child labour by 2016."

While agricultural workers and peasants in the West Bengal community of Singur continue to defy state repression in their struggle against the planned eviction of 6,000 poor families from prime farmland to make way for an auto plant, a new struggle has been launched against the latest government farmland seizure.

The murder of Jesús Marino Mosquera, an activist in the Colombian rural workers' union SINTRAINAGRO who was killed on October 11 while returning home from the farm where he worked in Carepa, has been followed by threats to the lives of two members of the union's national executive. On October 26, masked gunmen entered the Apartadó home of Medardo Cuesta. Cuesta was not at home, but the thugs left behind literature threatening him as well as union leader Oswaldo Cuadrado.