It is difficult to interpret the recently published draft rules introducing black shareholding requirements for new water use licences as anything other than a crude attempt by government to Band-Aid its own failure over the last 30 years to achieve meaningful reform in the farming sector.
At best the proposed regulations, which propose that certain enterprises would need between 25% and 75% black shareholding to apply for water licences, will achieve superficial and cosmetic transformation where the only real change would be in the numbers reported by politicians in speeches.
At worst, they risk cutting off a crucial input to those farms responsible for growing the produce needed to ensure food security in SA.
In fact, the draft regulations, published on May 19 by the department of water & sanitation, don’t even try to pretend to be about achieving meaningful transformation. As agriculture organisations have pointed out, the regulations focus on only one element of transformation, namely ownership. They ignore empowerment factors such as community empowerment and the extent to which enterprises promote black suppliers.
It cannot be comfortable for leaders in SA’s primary agriculture sector which, let’s not beat about the blueberry bush, remains largely dominated by white farmers, to be confronted with the reality that between 75% and 98% of water set aside under existing water-use allocations is still in the hands of whites.
None of us should be comfortable with the fact that, as the agriculture and agro-processing master plan suggests, black farmers still own a less than 20% share in overall agriculture production.
But it is not white farmers who are responsible for this slow pace of transformation. It is government which has failed, through corruption, mismanagement and incompetence, to achieve its own land reform targets.
Moreover, the larger failure has been the inability to support black farmers, regardless of how they gained access to land, to succeed in growing their businesses or even just keeping them afloat.
Important research by Agbiz chief economist Wandile Sihlobo and Prof Johann Kirsten, a director at the Bureau for Economic Research and a professor in agricultural economics at Stellenbosch University, exposed some widely held myths about land reform in SA.
Their research found, for example, that the widely quoted statistic that only 8% of land in SA had been redistributed to black people was incorrect and that the real number was closer to 24%.
Transformation
What this number does not show is the extent to which the transfer of land has led to transformation in the sector. A large share of land-reform farms have failed — according to the DA as much as 75%.
It might be true in a few cases that new black farmers fail or struggle because of the difficulties they face getting access to water for irrigation. But for the majority the challenges are rather about access to financing, access to markets and access to the type of infrastructure required to run a successful farming business.
The government’s agricultural extension services, which should provide new farmers with practical support on the ground, have become dysfunctional.
Very little has been done to expand existing water and irrigation infrastructure since the early 1990s. The National Development Plan estimated that SA’s roughly 1.5-million hectares under irrigation could be expanded by 500,000ha through better use of existing water resources and developing new water schemes. Not much came of this and later research showed that this estimate was probably overly optimistic.
The sector master plan published last year targets a more ambitious 20,000ha expansion in areas under irrigation by 2030, but so far this plan has not moved beyond the paper it was written on.
It is no use giving a farmer access to water when there is no infrastructure to irrigate, an erratic supply of electricity to run irrigation systems, and when roads linking the farm to markets and suppliers are in such bad shape that they can’t be travelled without risking your life.
Just as transferring land without also providing the necessary support failed to turn new black landowners into successful farmers, race-based conditions for water licences will also fail as a tool for transformation when the wider problems that trouble all farmers are not addressed.
As the draft regulations stand, they will do worse than fail. They will do active harm to rural economies that are already hanging on by a thread.
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