When ‘dry white’ is not a vintage but a disaster
● The severe drought in the Western Cape is taking its toll on key industries that are the province’s mainstay of economic activity.
This year the wine industry, which accounts for 4% of global production and is the seventh-largest global producer, is bracing for its smallest harvest in more than a decade.
Last year the wine industry generated revenues of about R9-billion and recorded a 4% increase in volume to 401 million litres despite concern that land under tillage was shrinking.
The area under vines has been shrinking since 2007. In 2016 the total area under vines amounted to 95 775ha compared with 100 568ha in 2011 — a 5% decline over that time.
Francois Viljoen, consultation service manager at VinPro, said the drought that had been prevalent in the province for three consecutive seasons would affect the 2018 harvest.
“Most of the industry’s large irrigation dams are 30% to 40% full. This means that wine-grape producers’ water resources were cut by 40% to 60% and they could not fully meet their vines’ water demand,” Viljoen said.
“This available water is simply not enough to meet the needs of the vineyards at this stage,” says Viljoen.
“Vineyards are now beginning to show symptoms of water shortage and declining berry growth. Smaller berries mean a lighter harvest with lower juice levels, which contribute to lower volumes.
“The low dam levels and insufficient water resources are most likely to be the greatest determinant of a smaller 2018 harvest. Good, regular showers in January may, of course, bring great relief and change the outlook for the better.”
But any rain in the next few weeks is unlikely to be sufficient to break the drought.
The yields of other wine-producing countries, among them France, Italy, Spain and the US, have also been affected by natural phenomena.
Economic observers say other economic sectors in the Western Cape, such as tourism, fruit farming and horticulture, will take a knock from the drought. Losses in revenue could run into billions of rands.
Michelle Mokone, an agriculture economist at Grain SA, said even more farreaching would be the significant socioeconomic effects that were emerging from the drought.
“In the third quarter of 2017, South Africa’s agricultural sector saw 25 000 jobs losses, with the Western Cape accounting for 84% of those third-quarter job losses, which shows the effect of the drought and water shortages in the area,” she said.
“In 2017 there was a total of 109 000 job cuts.
“The drought in the Western Cape is also a major concern for farmers, who stand a risk of losing their farms due to farm debt caused by low production volumes and the road to recovery will be a long one.”
Wessel Lemmer, Absa’s senior agricultural economist, said the Western Cape contributed about 22% to the agricultural GDP of South Africa’s total GDP contribution by agriculture.
“We will only notice the total real impact [of the drought] as we progress through 2018, but it can be significant as fruit quality and yield are seriously impacted by insufficient quantities of available irrigation water.
“It is imperative that any unnecessary wastage of water by poor urban infrastructure and our population needs to be addressed sufficiently,” he said.
Cape Town’s Day Zero — the day when the city will run out of water and will stop pumping water to residents — is expected in April because dam levels continue to drop quickly.
This week, as water supplies continued to fall, the city announced it would implement daily individual water-usage limits of 50 litres, down from 87 litres.
The new limit takes effect next month and is under Level 6B water restrictions that are necessary “to make up for the many months of missing the city’s 500 million litres a day target”.
The city target is water consumption of 450 million litres a day for 150 days‚ after which a reassessment will be done. Level 6B will also limit irrigation to boreholes and well points.