This article considers the socioeconomic changes that have impacted on the lives of poor children since the end of apartheid in South Africa. In particular, the article highlights the ways in which child labour legislation after 1994 has had the unintended consequence of deepening chronic hunger and childhood poverty on food-rich farms where children formerly participated as seasonal or part-time workers. Drawing on more than 10 years of ethnographic research beginning in 1996 in the Western Cape, this article demonstrates, through its focus on childhood poverty, the trappings of democracy in the post-apartheid era. (Contains 2 figures and 1 note.)