One of the largest recent water related news stories in Africa was Cape Towns drought in January this year. Whilst the causes for this drought have been debated Day Zero, when water supply would be shut off and only emergency rations would be available, has been avoided for now. However whilst this may mean that supplies will return to normal the damage done to the agricultural industry is not so easily reversed.
Rationed water supplies to farmers in the Western Cape led to farmers having to cut irrigation to an estimated 25% of their vineyards and deciduous fruit orchards. Therefore whilst these farmers usually only replace their vines and trees when they come to the end of their productive lifespans every 15 to 20 years they are now faced with having to replace a quarter of them at once if they want to return to full production. On top of this lack of adequate irrigation to surviving vines has lead to smaller grapes and thus a smaller juice harvest and reduced wine production. However repairing drought damage is not simply an economic issue as drought rations still continue. As of mid-September farmers were still operating on a 60% water cut with little communication of how this would change in the coming months, thus making any sort of long term plan difficult.
Whilst a drought hitting wine and fruit production may not fit the imagined narrative of African water shortage it is not just the large land owners and wine drinkers who are being hit by this. Agriculture in the Western Cape provides 340,000 jobs and 10% of the provinces GDP, the drought led to a loss of 30,000 jobs and 5.6 billion Rand. Professor Mark New from the University of Cape Town has suggested that the majority of these lost jobs have been seasonal harvesting jobs, short term employment normally occupied mainly by poor local workers.
This example seems to show that drought, and potentially mismanagement of water, can have effects on people at all levels, not just the poor or subsistence farmers but also large land owners and short term labourers.
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| Vineyard in the Western Cape. Source: Tourism Update |
Whilst a drought hitting wine and fruit production may not fit the imagined narrative of African water shortage it is not just the large land owners and wine drinkers who are being hit by this. Agriculture in the Western Cape provides 340,000 jobs and 10% of the provinces GDP, the drought led to a loss of 30,000 jobs and 5.6 billion Rand. Professor Mark New from the University of Cape Town has suggested that the majority of these lost jobs have been seasonal harvesting jobs, short term employment normally occupied mainly by poor local workers.
This example seems to show that drought, and potentially mismanagement of water, can have effects on people at all levels, not just the poor or subsistence farmers but also large land owners and short term labourers.
Hello ! It's true that droughts can really negatively impact yields. Especially this can be hard for small-scale farmers. Have you read about how much the drought impacted the yield? I want to say how's the average yield and how much was it after the drought year? Would be interesting to know, because I cannot really understand how much it is when you say they had to cut their irrigation to 25%.
ReplyDeleteBest, Fiona
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