The irrigation water boozed by South Africa’s burgeoning golf-course estates would satisfy the basic water needs of at least 75% of South Africans, a few simple sums indicate.
According to Tony Vaughan, publisher of The Property Magazine, each golf course consumes between 1,5-million and two million litres of water a day. Tourism agencies say there are at least 500 golf courses in South Africa — and the number is growing daily, mainly on the eastern and southern coast, Gauteng and Mpumalanga.
Rand Water’s Tendani Tsedu said the state’s ”Reconstruction and Development Programme standard” was 25 litres of water per person per day. Totting up the figures, the minimum amount of water 500 golf courses consume would be equivalent to the basic amount 30-million people — 75% of South Africans — should receive daily.
Water-greedy golf courses and estates were among the land types earmarked last Friday for ministerial regulation by a panel of experts probing foreign land ownership. The panel noted golf estates ”are developed by South Africans but marketed abroad. Houses are therefore owned by foreigners, but not the rest of the estate.”
The Institute of Estate Agents of South Africa has protested that the moratorium on foreign land ownership proposed by the panel ”would stall golf and polo estates across the country”.
”There is a large percentage of global investors who like playing the golfing circuit,” the institute’s national president, Bill Rawson, said this week. ”These are the quality of tourists and investors we need — upper executives who bring skills and capital into the country.”
But the foreign ownership panel joined government officials and environmental lobbyists in insisting golf courses are undesirable, particularly on prime agricultural land. The panel identified their water consumption as a problem.
Western Cape environment minister Tasneem Essop introduced ground-breaking guidelines last December defining future development of golf courses, golf estates and polo fields. The southern Cape coastline has at least 40 gold courses, with another 13 on the cards.
”Our water resources are under threat, with 97% of all mainstream river ecosystems in the Western Cape critically endangered, owing to over-extraction of water, disturbances of riparian habitats and impacts of land use in catchment areas,” Essop said.
Some developers have introduced ”package treatment plants” that recycle sewage effluent to greens. But the eThekweni municipality slapped a moratorium on these in 2003 after at least 66 incidents where e.coli bacteria was discharged into local rivers. The national Department of Water Affairs and Forestry is investigating.
Provinces and councils inundated with applications for golf estate developments are awaiting the outcome of a precedent-setting decision by Essop’s department last month. It rejected an application for the development of a second golf estate in the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve by Arabella South Africa.
The first phase of the estate consumes about four million litres of water a day — two million on the golf course and two million in a luxury resort.
Among the department’s reasons for rejecting phase two was that it did not meet provincial requirements for environmental development and would harm a sensitive coastal area. Arabella executive director Riaan Gous said an appeal would be lodged by the end of this month.