Commercial agriculture is collapsing in the Karoo due to a severe and prolonged drought, leaving some farmers with no option but to abandon their farms.
"The scale is far bigger than anyone in this country understands. This drought is bigger than anyone has ever seen or ever known," says Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, director of Gift of the Givers.
At least 63 towns are in need of immediate and substantial drought assistance, and Sooliman describes commercial agriculture in the Karoo as being in a state of "total collapse".
Gift of the Givers has provided R210m in drought relief since 2017. Sooliman estimates that they would need a further R300m for the next year for the Northern Cape alone.
We are not anticipating climate change, we are in it
— Andrew Marquard
The drought started in 2015 and the rains have yet to come.
According to Stats SA's latest figures, the Northern Cape has experienced a 16.3% year-on-year reduction in farm employment. Eight thousand agricultural jobs have been lost.
With a population of about 3,000 people, Strydenburg is a small Karoo town straddling the N12 highway, 180km southwest of Kimberley and well past desperation.
The main road starts at a petrol station with a liquor store, runs past a variety of closed shops, and ends at an abandoned community centre.
Beyond the empty swimming pool and rotting diving board, the dry Karoo stretches out to the horizon.
Hennie Zwiegers owns a sheep farm a few kilometres outside Strydenburg. His family have been farming there since 1837, but he will probably be the last the person in his family to do so.
He says "there's no future in farming" and he doesn't expect to make it through the winter. Even if the rains do return on time, Zwiegers thinks it would take another five years for the land and livestock to recover. His few remaining sheep have stopped reproducing and his game are dying from a lack of edible vegetation.
The disintegration of the livestock industry is leaving Karoo towns like Strydenburg with an economy revolving around social grants and a few state jobs.
Hardly sufficient to deal with unemployment, expanding townships and deepening social ills.
The average annual income in the Thembelihle municipality, which incorporates Strydenburg, is R29,400.
Brenda Mphamba, ANC mayor of Thembelihle, says that the community has seen an increase, since 2016, in the use of tik and mandrax.
Steven Paulus, principal of the Strydenburg Combined School, describes the town's social problems as "a horror state of affairs", adding that: "We have a spike in drug abuse, we have a spike in teen pregnancy, we have a spike in lawlessness."
Day zero arrived for Strydenburg in 2016. In the midst of the drought and a failed economy is the head of the local branch of the ANC, Leon Jantjies. He sits on the board of the local clinic and of Future Leaders, an NGO that tries to give the town's youth a pathway out of drug abuse, despair and hopelessness.
Since the start of the drought, Jantjies has seen a dramatic increase in house break-ins, youth unemployment and drug abuse. "Water is at the heart of everything. Without water you can't have development."
Strydenburg has been under severe water restrictions for the past three years: with a supply for six hours per day at the most. However, the Mandela Square township has such low water pressure that residents have to rely on four JoJo tanks. The water for the tanks gets trucked in from Hopetown, 50km away.
Hester Obermeyer is the spokesperson for Save the Sheep, an NGO working out of Sutherland, which is 470km from Strydenburg. To unlock R2.5bn in disaster relief, Save the Sheep has called on the provincial government to declare the whole of the Northern Cape a disaster area.
Without urgent assistance from the state, Obermeyer predicts that "farms are going to close down, their gates are going to be locked and the keys handed over to the banks. People are going to lose their jobs.
"A year ago the job losses in Sutherland, directly due to the drought, were 224 people. For a small town like Sutherland that is disastrous."
The department of agriculture did not respond to requests for comment.
Statistics collected by Save the Sheep show that Sutherland used to have a carrying capacity of 400,000 sheep in 2015 but now can support only 63,000 sheep.
Though it is hardly ever discussed in the debate about land, the drought is undermining the government's land redistribution efforts. Both emerging and established farmers are leaving their farms.
Three years ago, Strydenburg had 75 emerging farmers. Many of those farmers have now abandoned farming altogether. Those who still farm do so on the sparse municipal land in and around Strydenburg, according to Andries Maries, chair of the Emerging Farmers Association.
Maries is a former farmworker who has been farming in the area for more than 30 years. If the drought continues for another year or two, he says: "It will be very difficult for me as an emerging farmer. I will have to sell my animals and stop farming."
Extreme concern
Associate professor Emma Archer, an environmental scientist at the University of Pretoria, says: "The winter rainfall region is a very significant contributor to national agriculture, and, as a result, severe drought during the winter rainfall season is of extreme concern."
SA's agricultural sector declined by 13.2% in the first quarter of 2019, a 0.3% contribution to the nation's overall 3.2% GDP contraction.
Economist Mike Schussler believes GDP numbers for the second quarter will also be down because of the drought.
Gazetted on May 6 2019, the department of environmental affairs' draft National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy states that observed climate warming in SA is already two degrees celsius per century, twice the global average.
Andrew Marquard at the University of Cape Town’s Energy Research Centre says, “I would say that for any drought in southern africa now, there is a climate factor. It seems the latest science is that we are now not anticipating climate change, we are now in it.”
• Taylor is postdoctoral researcher at Stellenbosch University and Cupido is a human rights lawyer. The Heinrich Boell Foundation provided support for the field research for this article
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