Eastern Cape Land Affairs and Agriculture Minister Gugile Nkwinti has sparked controversy between game farmers and the government by attacking game farms as ”elitist”. ”There is a recolonisation of the countryside. Game farms are taking over,” he told a meeting of farm workers and residents in Grahamstown.
Nkwinti’s comments sparked a retaliation by the Mantis group, owners of the famous Shamwari Game Reserve, who argued that game farming had increased both employment and wages.
However, Nkwinti’s statements were echoed by the Eastern Cape Agricultural Research Project (Ecarp), which this week released research finding that game farm development is undermining land reform.
Finding that the game farming and hunting industry has expanded by between 50% and 60% in the Makana and Ndlambe municipalities over the past five years, it called for an immediate moratorium on the expansion of game farms in Makana, Ndlambe and Sunday’s River.
”This increase in game farms is staggering, given the fact that rural people desperately require land to secure basic socio-economic rights,” said Lali Naidoo, Ecarp organiser. ”Land for redistribution purposes is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity.”
Responding to Nkwinti’s attack in an open letter to the minister this week, Mantis group chairperson Adrian Gardiner said a report showed that the region’s private game reserves were employing 31,2 times more people than the livestock and grain farms they had replaced, while average farm-worker wages had also risen.
However, Nkwinti was unrepentant, telling the Herald newspaper that his comments were not about jobs, but about Africans’ access to, and ownership of, land.
”These commercial game farmers assume the African people will always be labourers under them, that no African will own land,” he said.
The Ecarp report says that because land is getting scarcer and more expensive, Africans have a shrinking chance of becoming landowners. It suggests people are losing livelihoods and secure tenure because cattle ranches are being converted into game farms.
Nomsimelelo Mekani, from the farm Lalibela outside Grahamstown, reportedly told the Grahamstown farmworkers’ meeting that she was moved from her house to a corrugated iron structure without windows when the farm where she worked was sold and converted into a game farm. Her new home lacked water and sanitation.
”We had to wake up at four in the morning to walk to another farm where we stole water,” she said.
Ecarp says that at least 116 households have been evicted from farms as a result of conversion, affecting 529 residents. It adds that the discrepancy between the pace of land redistribution and the increase in the number of game farms is ”of grave concern”. Between 1996 and 2003, more than 170 game farms provided hunting facilities in the Eastern Cape, while in June 2002 the number of land redistribution projects in the province amounted to 42, totalling 18 624ha. The total area of game farms specialising in hunting alone amounted to 372 880ha.
The report highlights a case where farm dwellers in the Carlisle Bridge area wanted to buy land where their children’s school was located. But the farm was sold to someone who intended using it for game farming.
It also refers to farm dweller Beauty Bashe, who had lived on her piece of land for 20 years before her employer died and the farm was sold to safari operators. The community had resisted attempts to remove them, resulting in a two-year stalemate.
Community members claimed the new owner had denied them grazing rights and limited their access to the farm. They are now taking court action.
Another member of the community, Neliswa Klaas, claimed the owner had sent witchdoctors to tell them ”that the game reserve was going to have dangerous wild animals”, and that they should move.