Northern Cape farmers are concerned about the imminent failure of their maize crop, and have called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to declare a state of disaster in the agriculture industry.
The farmers held an awareness rally on Friday last week in the farming town of Douglas and met Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer last week to plead their case.
Farmers in the semi-arid Northern Cape, including in the towns of Prieska, Hopetown and Douglas, depend largely on irrigation and they have been heavily affected by the recent sustained load-shedding. Their counterparts in the sugar cane sector are asking for enough hours of uninterrupted electricity to enable pumping of water and irrigation.
The farmers also ask that the load-shedding schedule be redesigned to take into account the needs of different industrial sectors in different regions.
Agri SA Northern Cape president Nicol Jansen said when the load-shedding schedules were being developed, power cuts were only intermittent.
“We [now] have load-shedding as a permanent feature so this is a whole different ball game. So therefore, the load-shedding schedule has to be tailor made and take into account how it will affect different industries.”
The under irrigation maize crop, which accounts for about 17% of all maize in SA, needs 60ml of water a week at pollination time, said Jansen. He spoke at the rally on Friday. Northern Cape maize farmers cannot now give more than 40ml of water a week to their crop and Jansen warned if it is not resolved by the first week of February, whole maize crops could be lost.
“If you don’t have enough moisture in the soil and water content in the pollination phase, then you will lose that [maize] crop. And then there is the possibility that you can harvest zero.”
“We need the president to see the urgency of the disaster,” said Jansen. “We needed a disaster declaration to give Eskom the power to act immediately.”
He is optimistic that there is time to save the irrigated maize crop.
“We still are able to minimise the damages. But if we don't have more electricity in the next week or two, it will be devastating.”
De Ruyter
On Sunday, in a press conference, Eskom CEO André de Ruyter said the power utility was aware of the challenges load-shedding posed to farmers and the risk this held for food security.
“As far as Eskom is concerned we are working with the [department of agriculture] to implement schemes so that farmers can have access to time-critical electricity so that they can look after their crops,” he said.
De Ruyter said that while it would implement changes in response to the pleas from irrigation farmers, Eskom was not always able to assist as it was not in control of municipal infrastructure on which some farmers are dependent.
The difficulties faced by farmers pose a risk to the sustainability of small farming towns that are the main employers in rural areas, said Agri SA.
Meanwhile, Agri SA CEO Christo van der Rheede said in a meeting between the farming industry and Eskom that Oberholzer had lamented the lack of funding for diesel needed for the open gas turbines.
Agri SA called on the government to provide funds for diesel to Eskom to keep stages of load-shedding lower. “Ample provision for this must be made in the national budget,” it said in a statement. It says farmers, who must irrigate their crops rather than rely on rainfall, manage with stage 2 load-shedding, but struggle from stage 3.
SA Canegrowers CEO Thomas Funke explained to Business Day how difficult it was for sugar cane growers to manage irrigation with less power.
“Growers cannot simply redesign their irrigation systems to put more water in a shorter time frame.”
Funke said: “Growers desperately need a customised load-shedding schedule. They need to have longer hours of continuous power of between six to eight hours to get irrigation systems on pressure, fill holding dams and to distribute the correct amount of water as per irrigation system designs and crop needs.
“Discussions are currently under way with both Eskom and local municipalities to find a sustainable solution.”
With Denene Erasmus
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