Ann Eveleth
A row broke out this week between the Department of Agriculture and other parties engaged in the campaign against land degradation. The heated fracas – on the eve of World Desertification Day next Wednesday – follows a decision by national and provincial agriculture officials to disband a broad-based steering committee set up in 1995 to develop a grassroots land-care programme to prevent soil erosion.
The Environmental Monitoring Group, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism raised the alarm this week when they received letters from the agriculture department’s resource conservation director, Njabulo Nduli, informing them of the decision.
They claimed it effectively kicked them out of a process that was meant to be widely consultative.
South Africa ratified the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification last September, committing itself to a participatory process with communities affected by land degradation – mainly those living in former homelands – and the development of a national action programme.
The departments of land, agriculture, environmental affairs, water and forestry are each expected to take steps to counter the degradation of natural resources under their control.
A national interdepartmental steering committee to co-ordinate these efforts began working last year.
But an informal steering committee from various arms of the government and civil society began working with the Department of Agriculture’s anti-erosion LandCare programme much earlier, in 1995.
This group held a workshop in April this year which recommended a national steering committee representing all key stakeholders be formalised.
Erstwhile committee members told the Mail & Guardian this week they were “shocked” to learn that a meeting of agricultural ministers and MECs last month had instead decided to place the LandCare policy process in the hands of national and provincial department officials only.
Environmental Monitoring Group representative Noel Oettle said the “top down” decision flew in the face of South Africa’s international obligations to carry out a “participative, grassroots process”.
CSIR representative Dirk Versfeld added: “An initiative of that nature cannot succeed without outside input.”
And environmental affairs department representative Wilma Lutch – who is the government’s national representative on the convention – said her department had had “no input in this decision.
Suddenly the steering committee is disbanded. [The convention] is all about partnerships and bottom-up approaches. We need LandCare for [the convention] and if we’re out, then we can’t use it.”
Nduli denied the steering committee had been disbanded, saying: “It was just a group of enthusiasts. [The committee] had no official standing. You can’t say it was disbanded.”
Her letter to stakeholders, however, informed them that the “LandCare steering committee of the past two years is in effect disbanded”. She said these stakeholders still had a role to play in LandCare’s “evolving process” at a provincial level.
But Oettle argued that the groups needed to participate at national, provincial and local level. “The truth is that policy is not decided at a local level,” he said.
“What [the Department of] Agriculture has in mind is a major 10-year programme, a job-creation approach and the creation of erosion-control structures. The lessons that environmental NGOs have learned is that this `rocks in dongas’ approach does not work, because then people are not responsible for their soil.
We have argued for a longer, slower and deeper approach, and I think the government wants to avoid that,” added Oettle.
Research nearing completion on soil-erosion projects around the country supported his view.
The CSIR’s Versfeld said the Department of Agriculture is “extremely short on resources and capacity. We’re willing and able to help, and we have the capacity. We see this move as a rejection of that offer of support by an organisation which cannot afford to reject it.”
Minister of Agriculture and Land Affairs Derek Hanekom says he sees no reason why NGOs cannot continue to contribute to the process. He says he will call a meeting of stakeholders “to discuss how we can best give effect to the participation of NGOs”.
The UN estimates that 90% of South Africa’s land is vulnerable to soil erosion and land degradation – a process that results from the pressures of human activities – overgrazing, intensive farming, deforestation and poor irrigation on the land.
ENDS