Kader Asmal is quietly performing the miracle of regaining control of the country’s water while keeping happy the farmers whom this will affect most, writes Eddie Koch
BOET VAN RENSBURG, the owner of a vast Highveld mielie estate that is irrigated with some of the cheapest water in the world, is quite proud of the fact that farms like his are the main source of jobs and wages that give most people who live in the region of Middelburg the chance to have a decent life.
And it is those prospects, says Van Rensburg, not only his own substantial livelihood, that are at stake in the “quiet revolution” now taking place in the South African countryside: a carefully managed plan by Water and Forestry Minister Kader Asmal to regain ownership and control of the nation’s rivers and underground water resources so that these can be controlled and shared out in an equitable way.
There is a fair amount of apprehension on the stoeps of the homesteads around the town of Middelburg, where Van Rensburg and his neighbours gather to drink coffee and discuss the politics of the day, about the fact that Cabinet has just approved Asmal’s plans. The talk, though, is not of counter- revolution. It is about how to adapt to an inevitable reality.
“Water nationalisation will create a heavy opposition from the farmers,” says the mielie farmer. “But if the government is going to take our water so it can be shared with others downstream, then it must value that water and pay us for what is taken away. We think the government should concentrate on new methods of irrigation and water consumption that can save water for sharing. Otherwise these changes will destroy the goose that lays the golden egg for the people who live around here.”
Van Rensburg’s sentiments are phrased in a different language, but they do coincide with the basic premises that have allowed the water minister to proceed with plans to overhaul the country’s water laws without the kind of brouhaha that surrounded the announcement of the government’s land redistribution measures.
“While there remains an understandable apprehension in many circles about existing rights and other interests, even the farmers realise – and I say this after meeting with both representatives of organised agriculture, irrigation boards and individuals – even farmers realise that the right to take water from a dry river is worthless,” said Asmal when he made a discussion document, on which his water coup is based, available earlier this year.
The pragmatism of people like Van Rensburg and his neighbours – an adaptability that has made them into the successful farmers they are – is probably based on an intuitive awareness that, like the air we breathe, water is a common asset that needs to be managed by the state.
Other countries in the Western world, especially semi-arid ones like South Africa, have long recognised this and have nationalised water management systems in place.
The situation in South Africa has for the last 100 years been very different. Farmers have literally been able to dam rivers, pump them dry and use boreholes to pump as much groundwater as they like while further downstream rural women can spend up to six hours a day filling their drums from collective standpipes in their villages.
Big commercial farmers use up more than 50% of the nation’s water when they irrigate their land in this way. At the same time, it is estimated that between 12- and 14-million people in South Africa have inadequate or no water supplies. A further 21-million people have no safe sanitation systems.
A study entitled South Africa’s Rich and Poor: Baseline Household Statistics published by the South African Labour and Development Research Unit (Saldru) at the University of Cape Town in 1994 notes that of the total rural population surveyed for the study, 46,4% said they rated piped water as the most important service that the new government should provide.
More than 56% of the population in the Northern Province listed water as their top livelihood priority. And it is estimated currently the average irrigation water required for one hectare of land is enough to meet the domestic needs of almost 900 rural villagers.
“Two primary legal constraints are `private water’ and `riparian rights’. Private water essentially includes rainfall, soil water and ground water occurring on or underneath private land, together with streams which rise and flow over a single piece of private land,” says Simon Forster in a paper on water reform written for the Land and Agriculture Policy Centre.
“The state has little control over what a private land owner does with his private water. South African water law does not recognise the hydrological cycle as an indivisible continuum, nor does it acknowledge water as a national asset …
“Water flowing in a public stream [any stream which is not deemed to be private] is public water. However, private landowners can and do have rights to divert and use a portion of both the normal and surplus flow of a public stream. Riparian water rights form part of the title deeds of land and were originally granted when river utilisation was negligible.
“Today, with the immense pressure on water resources, riparian land owners are technically and legally capable of pumping many rivers dry, particularly during low flow periods.”
Forster estimates that more than 65% of all water currently used in South Africa is either privately owned or used under historically obtained riparian rights. Private water used up by the accelerated pumping of groundwater, dryland and rainfed farming – including forest plantations – and the proliferation of small dams on farms has resulted in a huge decrease in water that reaches our rivers.
He adds: “When viewed in conjunction with the expansion in irrigation that has taken place during the last two decades, the conclusion can be made that a relatively small number of landowners now control the greater portion of the nation’s utilisable water.”
Last week the Cabinet endorsed a set of principles that, when they are turned into legislation next year, will end all that. The most important is a drastic change to the system which allows private ownership of water. In order to “provide a uniform system of allocation of water rights over which the state has complete control” it says “there shall be no ownership of water but only a right to its use”.
Then principles stress that, after regaining control over all water, the state’s highest priority is to ensure that all South Africans receive enough water to meet basic human needs and ensure basic human health, estimated at “25 litres per person per day at a maximum cartage distance of 200m and of a quality which is not injurious to the health of the consumer”.
Next on the list of priorities is the need to ensure that the amount of water abstracted from rivers or underground sources – for domestic supply, agriculture or industry – should not prevent aquatic river systems from functioning in a state that maintains their biological richness. “Developments such as dams, abstractions and changes in land-use practice should be planned using integrated environmental management procedures,” they say.
The principles list a third urgency as being a sensitivity to the needs of countries which exist downstream of South African rivers. The “ecological reserve”, that amount of water set aside to ensure adequate functioning of aquatic ecosystems, should be sufficient and clean enough to meet the environmental needs of neighbouring countries.
“The objective of the review is to achieve greater equity in access to water. It is therefore inevitable that a number of controversial issues are raised,” said Asmal. These include suggestions that:
* The current system of riparian rights, which links the right to use water to a specific piece of land, would be abandoned.
* The uncontrolled use of underground water, made possible by its definition as “private water”, should end.
* Water supply and sanitation services be regulated to ensure not only that all South Africans have access to basic services but that the private sector should be harnessed to help provide them.
* Mandatory measures be made to require water suppliers to adopt conservation measures.
* Present controls on forestry, which intercepts a great deal of rainfall before it ever reaches public streams, could be extended to other land-use activities, such as sugar farming, which has similar impacts.
* The price of water would be set at a level which reflects its value – and pricing mechanisms should be the major tool for levering changes in the ways people use water.
The new principles steered through Cabinet last week are well crafted and designed to bring South Africa into line with modern water-management methods practised in most other parts of the world. But drafting the programme was the easy part. The critical challenge now will be to convert commercial farmers, a lobby that has long benefited from being the power base behind a minority ruling elite, to the new perspectives. Asmal insists there will be no big grab. Change will come gradually, enforced primarily by changes in pricing policy rather than by edict.
His department has committed itself to help find more efficient irrigation systems, least wasteful cropping methods and more remunerative niche markets for crops that can fetch market prices with increased water costs built in. Without resorting to the old subsidy system, which encouraged the kind of inefficiency that is now being addressed, the government is willing to help the farmers reposition themselves.
Which is probably why, although Asmal and the South African Agricultural Union have yet to see eye-to-eye on the matter, Boet van Rensburg and his mates are talking about how to adapt to the forthcoming laws rather than to fight them.