The Breede River Valley in the Western Cape is known as a fertile farming area that hosts internationally renowned vineyards, picturesque fruit orchards and tourist farm stalls, but a visit to Ashton’s Zolani township quickly scrapes away the lush veneer to reveal the reality of unemployment, poverty and hunger for many of its inhabitants.
Ashton, along with Robertson, Montagu, Bonnievale and McGregor, is one of a string of small farming towns that make up the Breede River Winelands District, home to one of the most developed agricultural areas in the Western Cape.
It’s also home to Elsie Sauls, a 52-year-old who lives in a part of Zolani township that has a rubbish dump on the hill above it and sewerage works below. When the garbage trucks come residents are covered with dust, and when the wrong wind blows the air smells foul.
Sauls’s household income consists of a R200 child support grant she receives for one of her three children, the scrapings she earns from irregular seasonal work on farms for three to four months of the year and a small income she derives from her sewing skills.
Like others in the township, Sauls is effectively trapped. If she wants to go to Ashton to buy vegetables the round trip will cost her R8 in taxi fares — an added expense to her shopping bill that she cannot afford.
If she wants to travel to Robertson, the next town, to take advantage of cheaper prices at the bigger shops there, it will cost R26, leaving her with no option but to buy whatever vegetables are available in the township at inflated prices.
Research by the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (Plaas) at the University of the Western Cape, Mawubuye Land Rights Forum and the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE), a collective of six NGOs that work on land and agrarian reform, shows that people like Sauls literally go hungry in a land of plenty, with 72% of 2 668 respondents to a household survey indicating that there were times in the last year when they had not had enough to eat.
Hunger, the survey revealed, had a strong seasonal dimension, with June to September, the cold and wet winter months, being the worst months of the year due to a lack of seasonal work, the lifeblood of poorer communities in the area.
The TCOE argues that throughout Southern Africa food security and sovereignty are being eroded by a combination of economic factors, climatic disasters and HIV/Aids, which lead to greater levels of land hunger, erosion of subsistence agriculture, displacement of local producers, unemployment and malnutrition.
There is also a gap when it comes to an agricultural policy that listens to the needs of those on the outskirts of commercial agriculture, as shown in the research done in the Breede River Winelands District.
It found that 22% of respondents were involved in growing fruit and vegetables while 14% had livestock, ranging from large stock to chickens.
A high percentage used the resulting produce for household food use, demonstrating that far from being dependent on outside intervention, respondents were in many cases taking charge of their own food security.
Sauls, for example, grows potatoes in her garden in order to supplement her diet, freeing up money to spend on other essentials.
At the same time, however, between 75% and 94% who currently have no access to land indicated a need for land.
And the survey noted that local government and municipal strategy in rural towns did not see land reform as a vehicle for economic restructuring, with rural municipalities appearing to have ”no vision, interest, expertise and capacity to support small scale agriculture”, something that Sauls and others in the district testify to.
Sauls and others in Zolani township, for example, say they have waited 20 months for progress on their efforts to get a lease on a piece of commonage so that they can grow some vegetables.
And in nearby Robertson, 50-year-old Jeffery Mpingelwane tells a similar story. Sitting on a makeshift chair outside a ramshackle hut on a 10ha piece of commonage on which he and 14 others eke out a living, he tells how he has waited since 1996 for progress on ownership of the land.
Without a lease, those working the land can’t raise the support needed to establish infrastructure, trapping them in a cycle of reliance on the municipality for trucked water for their animals.
In winter, when grass is scarce, Mpingelwane, who has lived and worked with livestock all his life, said he has to dig into his food budget to buy feed for his livestock, and without sufficient water the farmers cannot expand their vegetable production.
To build the capacity of people like Sauls and Mpingelwane in the Southern African Development Community countries of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Malawi, the TCOE, with the support of the Southern Africa Trust, is behind a project to lobby for policy that enhances food sovereignty, or the right of people to define their own food and agriculture policies.
Targeting small-scale farmers, peasant associations, rural women’s groups, farm worker organisations and landless people’s associations, the programme aims to strengthen these organisations in order to better inform policies to promote food sovereignty.
TCOE director Mercia Andrews said food security and rural livelihoods were not unrelated to issues about access to land.
Andrews said very little land was being passed on to poorer people, with similar patterns emerging in other areas where the TCOE worked in South Africa, such as Limpopo and the Eastern Cape.
She also points to the lack of a voice for the rural poor in policy forums and the often invisible nature of small-scale land use — despite evidence that people have a desire to feed themselves.
”So why is it that there is no land provided for people to grow food to feed themselves and for local markets? Why is it that food must be trucked in to areas when an area like this can support itself?”
She said commercial agriculture in its current form was not viable or sustainable, with an emphasis on cash crops to earn foreign exchange instead of a focus on feeding people.
In the Breede River region, the organisation of small-scale agricultural initiatives is emerging, with the Mawubuye Land Rights Forum, which works in partnership with The TCOE, boasting 1 000 members.
Similar organisational work is also taking place in Namibia, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe to raise the profile of peasant organisations so that the issue of food sovereignty can be placed on the policy agenda, said Andrews. — West Cape News