Farmers thirst for drop of hope
Government is about to release final master plan on water crisis
● The government is about to go public with the final version of its new master plan to tackle SA’s acute water challenges, with an announcement possible this week.
It can’t come too soon for the farmers of Northern Cape, who are among those hardest hit by persistent drought and water shortages and whose communities are slowly dying as employment prospects diminish and businesses flee.
About 70% of the Northern Cape is affected by drought regarded as the worst in 15 years, says Nicol Jansen, president of farmers’ organisation Agri Northern Cape. At least 15,500 farms are affected.
So dire is the situation that on Friday, Deputy President David Mabuza announced the province has reprioritised about R30m to urgently procure and distribute fodder.
With regards to water supply, Mabuza has tasked the department of human settlements, water & sanitation with drilling more boreholes in the area.
The government will engage with the Land Bank to find solutions to farmers defaulting on loans.
Jansen, who farms lucerne with irrigation, has not been as affected as some of his fellow farmers in Hopetown, particularly those who produce wheat, maize and cotton. Two farmers in the area who struggled to cope with rising debt and falling land values have committed suicide, he says.
Official GDP figures show that the agriculture sector, which bounced back last year, is again in recession, having contracted 16.8% in the first quarter and 4.2% in the second. Field crops and horticultural products fared particularly badly.
And though SA has always had cyclical droughts, experts say the risk of crippling multiyear droughts is projected to increase and that climate change is at least part of the reason.
Badr Kazi, a director at Gift of the Givers, says parts of SA have suffered more than seven years of drought. The economies of rural towns in the Northern Cape and Karoo, which depend on the business of surrounding farmers, have been severely impacted.
“What we are finding is that farmers are unable to employ workers anymore and these workers essentially become either beneficiaries of the state … dependent on social grants, or they sort of give up and go to the bigger towns,” says Kazi.
“So you have smaller economies imploding, and the mom and pop stores and the little garages [closing down].”
SA’s farmers owe R180bn to creditors including private banks, the Land Bank and agricultural co-operatives, up from R169bn earlier this year, according to Agri SA.
Bob Scholes, a professor of systems ecology at the Wits University Global Change Institute, says farmers are used to dealing with a single dry year but struggle when one year stretches into two years or more.
“The risk of multiyear drought is projected to increase as the century unfolds, and may be a key issue in making dry-land farming unviable in the future,” he says.
Janse Rabie, head of natural resources at Agri SA, says SA has always had cyclical droughts, but some parts of the country have now recorded above-average temperatures for prolonged periods, which appears to reflect a distinct change in climate.
“The issue of climate change raises the risk of unpredictability in the agricultural sector generally,” Rabie says.
“All these factors will have an impact on water availability, soil moisture levels, soil microbe interactions and pest and disease cycles, all negatively impacting crop production.”
SA’s acute water challenges were thrown into the spotlight again this week by news that the level of the Vaal Dam had dropped below 55%, though summer rains should begin soon. This comes while the important Lesotho Highlands water scheme, a major water source for the Vaal River system, is shut for maintenance for two months. The shutdown is a regular scheduled event and may affect only a few municipalities close to Lesotho, but it highlights SA’s lack of catchment areas to store water. Ageing dam infrastructure and collapsing wastewater treatment facilities are other areas of need.
Mike Muller, adjunct professor at the Wits School of Governance, says the government has built about 10 large dams since 1994, but maintenance of smaller infrastructure such as pipes, pumps and treatment plants was a serious problem.
“This should have a life of up to 40 years but we know that this is not being achieved in many cases because of municipal failures,” he says.
Simo Lushaba, a former CEO of Rand Water, says SA requires further capacity for bulk water storage.
“We have huge backlogs of maintenance, we have a lot of leakages that have now been exacerbated by illegal connections,” he says.
SA’s concerns over a water deficit were highlighted last year by the then minister of water & sanitation, Gugile Nkwinti, who warned that demand for water in SA could far outstrip supply by 2030.
Nkwinti was involved in initiating a “national water & sanitation master plan” that has gone through several consultation processes and is now ready to be published.
Sputnik Ratau, spokesperson for the department of human settlements, water & sanitation, says the plan is about “the state of readiness for the country in terms of water supply going forward, looking at 2030 and beyond. It’s a matter of how do we intervene in ensuring security of supply … so that as government we are not caught with our pants down when demand [for water] goes up.”
Ratau says the plan could be unveiled this week.
Muller says good management of the resource could mitigate the impact of water scarcity on economic growth, but the cost of new infrastructure could be passed on to industry and agriculture.
He says, however, that the farm sector has improved its water-use efficiency and has boosted production substantially without a significant increase in water consumption.
In the energy sector, all recent electricity planning has considered water-use efficiency as a key criterion, Muller says.