By Patrick Burnett
CAPE TOWN, Oct 16 2009 (IPS)

How do you fix a leaking pipe?

You plug it, of course, but what if there are tens of thousands of water connections all with potentially leaking taps and toilets?

To plug or replace all the faulty connections would cost tens of millions of dollars.

Ronnie McKenzie, managing director of engineering consultancy company WRP, said a flood of substandard cheap fittings had been used in houses.

This was "effectively a time bomb" because they were not designed to handle the water pressure or the heat and cold of southern African conditions.   But something has to be done. Water – a scarce resource – was literally going down the drain.

This was the problem in Sebokeng township in the Gauteng province of South Africa, home to about 420,000 people with 84,000 water connections, said McKenzie.

To fix the problem directly by retrofitting houses would have cost an estimated 21 million dollars, he said.

In this case, plugging the holes wasn't possible, but reducing the water pressure – and therefore the amount of leakage from the pipes – was.

WRP installed pressure reducing valves on the main pipe supplying water to the township, saving $4 million of water a year for the municipality, compared to the $600,000 it cost to build the pressure management system four and a half years ago.

But Geraldine Hochman, a senior policy specialist with water and sanitation NGO Mvula Trust says while municipalities do waste "quite a lot" of water and don't have proper monitoring in place to tell them were the leaks are, in the larger context of the country's water consumption the amount of water used by municipalities is negligible.

"The thing is domestic water wastage is far more visible," she said, giving the example of a tap left running for all to see in a populated urban area, compared to a farmer using water through inefficient irrigation.

Agriculture uses 64 percent of water in the Orange-Senqu river basin, a key water system for the country, while urban use, which includes both domestic and industrial consumption, accounts for 23 percent.

The water affairs department reports that 180 billion litres a year was lost to illegal water use for irrigation on the upper Vaal, part of the Orange-Senqu system.

In June, South Africa's Water Affairs Minister, Buyelwa Sonjica, highlighted concerns about major water losses in the agricultural sector.

Quoted ahead of a budget vote in Parliament, she noted the difficulty in monitoring and enforcing how much water was extracted from dams and rivers. In follow-up comments, the department said measurement of water supply and use in the agriculture sector was poor to non-existent.  

Water affairs spokesperson Linda Page maintains that efficiency improvement measures are being implemented in the agricultural sector, but argues that all sectors should be seen as equally important when it comes to minimising losses.

She said domestic sector water was more costly than water abstracted for irrigation and was also an area – along with industrial use – where demand is expected to grow, meaning that it made sense to ensure that water was used efficiently in these sectors.

An awareness kit produced for the Orange-Senqu River Commission (ORASECOM), set up under the SADC Shared Watercourses Protocol to advise the four countries in the basin on water issues, notes that water conservation and demand management are "urgently required" in the region and, unless implemented, many will suffer from inadequate water resources within the next 20 to 30 years.

Ensuring an adequate supply of water would require the basin countries to resolve the problem of low popular awareness that the region's resources were finite. In addition, inappropriate tariff structures, poor cost recovery, and problems of getting payment for water supplies would need to be solved, says the kit.

But some, like water specialist Dr Anthony Turton, argue that a "big priority" should be the theft of water stolen by farmers who have no abstraction permits, which causes a reduction in the assurance of supply to electricity giant Eskom and petro-chemicals company Sasol.

"South Africa has the most progressive water law in the world. What is lacking is enforcement. The simple answer therefore is to enforce the law that already exists."

Hochman believes that technical solutions – such as pre-paid meters – need to consider social components and that the public need to be informed about the measures taken to address demand issues.

Meanwhile, Hameda Deedat, a steering committee member of the South African Water Caucus, a civil society grouping, said innovation had a role to play in addressing wastage. She questions why, for example, rainwater harvesting is not used in Cape Town through the installation of water tanks in residential households.

"There are sustainable ways to address the issue," she said.

*This is the fifth in a series of articles on the Orange-Senqu River Basin.

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
MASERU, Sep 30 2009 (IPS)

Damage to wetlands high in Lesotho's Maluti mountains has impacts on the health of the whole of the Orange-Senqu river system.

Sediment washed down from the highlands is filling up dams and river beds along the Orange River. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

In so doing, they indirectly support the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), which captures water in dams and supplies it to water-thirsty South African industry and agriculture. The water Lesotho sells to South Africa is the mountain kingdom's largest source of foreign income.

However, a combination of factors, including infrastructure development, overgrazing and cultivation and the resulting erosion, has led to the wetlands being degraded.

A study produced in 2008 for the Orange Senqu River Commission (ORASECOM), titled "The Protection of Orange-Senqu River Water Sources", said some of the wetlands surveyed were dissected by deep gullies, indicating elevated erosion rates. The study focused on the catchment area of the Khubelu River, which is a major tributary to the Orange-Senqu.

"The degradation of the wetlands vegetative cover may reduce the ability of the wetlands soil to dissipate the erosive water forces. As such, rills and channels have formed resulting to gullies with extended soil scouring." The study found the wetlands had varying levels of degradation and gave the reasons as infrastructure development, uncontrolled livestock grazing and trampling and encroachment by cultivation.

With wetlands crucial for retaining water, purifying it and also regulating the flow of water, degradation of the wetlands affects the water supply in the LHWP.

In addition, the erosion had contributed to increased sedimentation of water downstream of the wetlands and thus in the Orange-Senqu river system, said the study.

The Caledon River flows from Lesotho into South Africa. Silt build-up in the river has had major implications for communities on the banks of the river.

The sedimentation problem in the river, which joins the Orange River and flows into the Gariep Dam in South Africa's Free State province, is the worst in South Africa and possibly the worst in the world, said Peter Pyke, a task team member of the Orange-Senqu River Commission (ORASECOM).

ORASECOM, set up under the SADC Shared Watercourses Protocol, was founded in 2000 with a focus on the use of shared water resources to address issues of poverty and food security.

Pyke, who was briefing ORASECOM delegates touring the Southern African region, said the sedimentation problem is caused by natural factors such as easily-eroded sandstone and rainfall, but aggravated by human factors such as a growing population.

Pyke, who is also a chief engineer for options analysis with South Africa’s water affairs department, said the silt build-up had in some areas added at least six metres to the river bed. In one area, a weir which used to have a three metre waterfall had now been completely buried by sand.

Further downstream, a new bridge has been built because the older one had flooded even in periods of minor flooding.

Because the bed of the river is now so much higher, farmland on either side of the river is now also subject to flooding.

Pyke said the problem was worse upstream of the Welbedacht Dam, built in the 1970s, because as the velocity of the water slowed before reaching the dam, sediment was deposited behind it.

Silt build up in the dam means it now stores less water. Initially built to hold 115 million cubic metres, the dam's reservoir now contains between seven and 15 million cubic metres.

Lesotho's Sechoocha Makhoalibe, who has worked as a regional project manager for previous ORASECOM studies, said the situation has been aggravated by land use management issues.

He said land tenure in the area was communal and this could lead to problems in taking care of land. Land disputes between local chiefs and community councils had a negative impact because it could mean that land was not taken care of, he said.

The 2008 report produced for ORASECOM recommends that a programme for conservation, rehabilitation and protection of the wetlands in the highlands of Lesotho would need to involve activities carried out by the local communities and the local government structures.

It would have to address range management, rehabilitation of degraded wetlands, a lack of information and monitoring capacity.

The study proposed four main interventions, which have been incorporated into rehabilitation work being done by the government of Lesotho, to be implemented by community, water, road and soil stakeholders.

These include range management to improve livelihoods of the 20,000 strong population in the area, rehabilitation of degraded wetlands, prevention of erosion from road drainage and the monitoring of results so that lessons learnt could be replicated in other areas.

*This is the fourth in a series of articles on the Orange-Senqu River Basin.

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
KAKAMAS, South Africa, Sep 29 2009 (IPS)

Near the banks of the Orange River, farm manager Le Roux Viljoen sends off an SMS to a weather station and receives an almost instantaneous response telling him the temperature, wind direction and estimated evaporation index.

The wisdom of exporting water-intensive crops from water-scarce regions is under consideration. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

In two months time, harvest will begin and the table grapes will fetch top prices as they arrive in European markets during the northern hemisphere winter.

The Kakamas area in South Africa’s Northern Cape province where the grapes are grown, however, receives minimal rainfall and farmers depend on water drawn from the Orange River, which receives water from the Lesotho highlands.

On either side of the irrigated vineyards, the land is brown and dry, populated by low scrubs.

Even though the lower reaches of the Orange River, from where the Vaal River meets the Orange to its mouth in Alexander Bay, are semi-arid, water-intensive crops such as grapes, pistachios, citrus, pecans and vegetables are grown in a green strip irrigated by the river.

On the other side of the river, in Namibia, similar vineyards can be found around Assenkehr. These are also irrigated from water pumped out of the river.

In the lower sections of the river, commercial agricultural accounts for 94 percent of the current total water requirement, according to figures from South Africa’s water affairs department. Irrigation is the biggest user of water in the Orange-Senqu river basin and with increased pressure on the resource, water extracted for this purpose is likely to come under increased focus.

Farmers around Kakamas are charged for water based on a quota system, which allocates a certain amount of water per hectare to each farmer.

This places the onus on the farmer not to exceed their quota and insiders acknowledge that the system is open to abuse.

Speaking off the record, one water official said it is inevitable that the system would eventually have to move to a metered system as this would more effectively control the amount of water being used and what was charged for it.

Moving from the current system to a metered one is a highly emotive issue amongst farmers, however, and installing and monitoring metering will be difficult.

But in a water-scarce system, does the growth of water-intensive crops for export even make sense?

With plans in place for construction of further phases of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which transfers water to South Africa, the World Wide Fund for Nature warned in an August report of the danger of water transfer schemes, arguing that they cause a "disproportioned amount of damage to freshwater ecosystems" and "unacceptable social and economic impacts both in the donor and the recipient basin".

The report said that in many cases there has been little examination of alternatives to these schemes, such as managing demand and promoting efficient water use.

Virtual water

The concept of virtual water attempts to assess trade in terms of the amount of water used in producing a commodity. Viewed through this lens, the farmers along the Orange River are exporting vast amounts of water out of a system that can ill-afford this.

Delegates on an Orange Senqu River Commission (ORASECOM) field trip in September were told by the Commission's technical task team member Peter Pyke that as water scarcity increases, so the most value possible has to be obtained from existing water supplies.

The idea is that instead of exporting virtual water out of the region ("embedded" in the boxes of juicy grapes from Viljoen's farm), water scarce regions should instead be importing crops from water-rich areas, saving water for other uses within the region.

"Much of the water saved locally could be reallocated to other uses and to environmental flows," says an awareness kit produced for ORASECOM, but adds that this would have to be balanced against the negative economic effects throughout the agricultural sector in South Africa.

ORASECOM executive secretary Lenka Thamae said the point is not to shrink the agriculture sector, which is a large employer of unskilled labour in the region, but to look at which crops are most suited for certain regions.

In the context of the Orange River, applying the concept of virtual water would imply that once an economic analysis of land and water had been done, farmers could be encouraged to adopt crops suitable to the areas they were farming in.

"Within the framework of regional co-operation like the SADC, areas with water and rainfall such as the Zambezi and parts of Angola could be encouraged to produce more crops," Thamae said.

The question of where to allocate any water saved by such changes is one that also needs to be addressed.

"Once you conserve water in one area, does industry qualify for additional water or does it become part of a bigger pot that can be used across countries?" asked Thamae. Mediating between conflicting demands from other countries in the Orange-Senqu basin and South Africa's mining and industrial users could be tricky.

But before that, said Thamae, it would be necessary to overcome the strong desire of individual countries to be self-sufficient in food to minimise the risk of relying on supply from beyond their borders.

The concept of virtual water is fast gaining ground as a way of understanding water use and management. But applying it to make concrete changes to trade patterns in the region is unlikely to take off soon.

In addition to the political questions and the potential for economic dislocation, Southern Africa's agriculture sector is poorly developed, and the water-rich countries that might be expected to become food exporters to drier regions are themselves reliant on food imports, says the ORASECOM awareness kit.

*This article is the third in a special series on the Orange-Senqu River.

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
ALEXANDER BAY, South Africa, Sep 28 2009 (IPS)

Much of the internationally-recognised wetland surrounding the Orange River mouth has lost its rich green colour. Situated close to long-standing diamond mining operations, the river's mouth has been treated with environmental disregard for decades.

Mining and other heavy water use upstream has badly damaged marshes at the mouth of the Orange River. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

In the background, mine dumps hulk over the scene. Later, when the wind begins to blow, clouds of sand and dust will cast a grimy haze over the area.

The mouth of the Orange River, with South Africa on the south side and Namibia on the north, is the end point of a river that originates 2,300 kilometres away in Lesotho. The estuary provides a variety of habitats and supports large numbers of birds, who use it for feeding and breeding on their migration routes.

Covering 500 hectares, the South African side of the river was declared a Ramsar site in 1991, one of 1,855 wetlands worldwide recognised as being of international importance.

A meeting held in 1971 in the town of Ramsar, Iran, resulted in the Ramsar Convention, an intergovernmental treaty that commits its member countries to maintain the ecological character of significant wetlands.

The Namibian side was added to the Ramsar list in 1995 – ironically the same year that South Africa's Ramsar zone was placed on a watch-list due to the collapse of its salt marshes.

Restoring the southern marshes is given additional urgency by a successful land claim by the Richtersveld community. The community has identified the mouth area as having eco-tourism potential if successful rehabilitation can take place.

But undoing environmental degradation requires managing the estuary of a heavily dammed river system that provides water to South Africa’s industrial and agricultural sector.

The river is the lifeblood of industrial, agriculture and domestic users along its length; sophisticated transfer systems supply water consumers far from its banks.

Of the main users of water, irrigation uses 47 percent of water in the basin, while urban and industrial users account for 25 percent.

Dewald Badenhorst, the deputy director for protected areas in the Northern Cape conservation department, said historically the main reasons for the deterioration of the wetlands were adjacent diamond mining activities, large volumes of dust and nearby oxidation ponds.

The construction of a raised causeway across the salt marshes in the 1960s to allow for beach access cut the wetlands into sections, preventing natural water flows.

Further upstream, a series of dams constructed from the 1960s onwards reduced the amount of water reaching the mouth.

A proposal to proclaim the area a provincial protected area acknowledges that many of the changes to the mouth region are irreversible, but that some aspects can be addressed. For instance, Badenhorst says as much as possible of the causeway will be removed, to enable water flow back to marshland areas.

Carmen Cloete, the secretary of the Richtersveld Community Property Association (CPA), which represents 3,200 members who settled a land claim with the government in 2007 under the Land Restitution Act, said the CPA was on an advisory committee dealing with rehabilitation.

She said the land claimants were a "relatively poor community" who relied on jobs in mining, guest houses and parks in the area.

Cloete said the community had a land use plan for all land under the restitution deal, which included the development of the Orange River mouth for tourism.

"My opinion is that the government must look at the area and rehabilitate it so we can use it for our economic benefit. If it is well rehabilitated then it can create work and we can see there can be a balance between mining and the mouth."

But to fulfil the area's tourism potential, important constraints will have to be overcome.

The region already hosts established eco-tourist attractions in the Richtersveld National Park and the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. Further potential has been identified based on the desert, mountain and ocean scenery, as well as the bird life hosted in the estuary, but a major marketing campaign would have to be mounted.

Other constraints, according to the provincial proposal, are a lack of infrastructure and services for tourists in terms of accommodation, restaurants, curio shops, tours and trails.

The rehabilitation efforts acknowledge that due to the establishment of large upstream dams the natural flow of the river will never be restored.

But because South Africa is a signatory to the Ramsar Convention, it has an obligation to ensure that the ecological integrity of the mouth is maintained through environmental flow requirements. However, large dams upstream have irrevocably altered the flow and there is no accurate gauging of how much water actually reaches the mouth.

Badenhorst said policies and strategies for agreeing and implementing required environmental flows should be developed and that a detailed study to improve understanding of environmental water requirements of the river and estuary was required.

Peter Pyke, a technical task team member for the Orange-Senqu River Commission (ORASECOM), says that a broad basin-wide study to determine flow requirements is under way which would address this issue and if necessary allow for water to be allocated in order to fulfill environmental flow requirements.

Even once this is done, if additional water is released into the river, managing flow requirements is problematic because the nearest dam from which water can be released is the Vanderkloof Dam, 1,400 kilometres away. This makes it difficult to manage flow conditions because water released from the dam has spread out by the time it reaches the mouth.

With rehabilitation plans going ahead, stakeholders accept that there are no quick fixes.

A development plan prepared for the area says the first 10 years should be considered as a rehabilitation and establishment phase, with history in other areas of South Africa showing that it took 20 and 30 years to establish a conservation area or reserve.

"It will take a lifetime," said Klaas van Zyl, the future reserve manager for the area, "All we can do is open up the channels (through the causeway) and then let nature take its course."

*This article is the second in a special series on the Orange-Senqu River.

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
KATSE, Lesotho, Sep 25 2009 (IPS)

In the steep valleys of Lesotho's Maluti mountains, women carry yellow plastic buckets of water across fields of dark-brown earth; a group of men form a human chain to pass rocks between them to build a small dam wall across a mountain stream; clothes are being washed in rivers; and men draped in blankets ride donkeys or horses along the roadside.

At 185 metres, the Katse Dam wall is Africa's highest. The dam is part of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project supplying water to South Africa through a system of huge underground tunnels. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

Completed in 1997, the dam's wall is 185 metres high, making it the highest in Africa, and it is 60 metres thick at its base.

Built under a joint partnership between South Africa and Lesotho, the Katse Dam forms part of the first phase of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). Through the LHWP, water is transferred from water-rich Lesotho through a system of huge underground tunnels from whence it is discharged into rivers that feed water-scarce South Africa, keeping its water guzzling economy alive.

Water earns the mountain kingdom hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty payments, its biggest source of foreign exchange.

From Katse Dam, the waters of the Orange-Senqu river make a 2,300 kilometre journey to the sea through some of southern Africa’s most striking geography.

The journey passes through the deserts of southern Namibia, through the semi-arid landscapes of South Africa’s Karoo and up onto the highveld, home to the biggest industrial complex in Africa.

Along the way are some of the biggest users of water in Africa, each raising complex issues about the management of the resource.

A working river: petrol

Four-hundred kilometres from Lesotho, in South Africa’s economic powerhouse of Gauteng, lies the town of Secunda, it's car dealerships, fast-food outlets and garish casino hotel dominated by a vast petro-chemicals plant that covers an area equivalent to 2,900 soccer fields.

It’s a factory of pipes that would stretch around the world if laid end to end, two skyscraping smoke stacks and eight cooling towers belching steam into the sky.

Water might not be uppermost in the minds of South Africa’s car owners when they fill up with petrol, but it’s crucial to South Africa’s fuel economy.

Sasol’s petro-chemicals plant at Secunda turns coal into liquid fuel, using 120,000 tonnes of coal to produce 160,000 barrels of fuel every day.

Cooling is crucial to a production process that requires 12 litres of water for every litre of fuel produced. Sasol goes through 270 million litres daily, accounting for about four percent of water use in the Vaal River system, a tributary of the Orange River, which is backed up by water from the Lesotho highlands.

The plant is crucial to the South African economy – fuel produced by Sasol accounts for around 30 percent of South Africa's transport needs, while Sasol's domestic turnover stands at more than 7 billion dollars, 1.73 percent of national turnover, according to company figures.

But Sasol's Secunda plant is the focus of attention for environmental concerns both for the large amounts of carbon dioxide it emits and for the water it draws from a water-scarce system.

This is the development conundrum: To keep its economy ticking, South Africa needs companies like Sasol. But it also has limited supplies of water and an ever-increasing number of users competing for it.

A working river: electricity

At the Optimum Colliery, situated 30 kilometres south-east of Middleburg, a giant excavator known as a dragline labours in the earth, scraping out 60 tonnes of earth at a time and dropping it on a nearby pile with a rumble of rocks and a cloud of dust.

In the background of this grey and brown landscape is the Hendrina Power Station, to which the colliery feeds millions of tonnes of coal a year.

To extract the approximately 11 million tonnes of coal a year it supplies to Eskom and export markets, 90 to 120 million cubic meters of earth is removed per annum to expose the coal to a depth of 60-80 metres – leading to the collection of run-off water.

Because only a limited amount of the untreated mine water, which is high in sulphur content, can be discharged into the water courses, the mine has to do something about accumulated water.

Previously it exercised controlled release into the water course and stored the remainder in old dams and storage facilities.

But space is running out, making water treatment the only option.

As a result a 15 megalitre desalination plant is being built at the mine at a cost of more than $74 million and will be completed by April 2010. The idea is to recover 98 percent of water as clean water, with some cost recovery through supply of water to the local municipality.

Polluted mine water – and its implications for health and agriculture – is a major problem for South Africa’s scarce water resources.

Because open cast coal mining often extends below the water table, water must be pumped out of the open hole. When mining ends, the hole floods, leading to the oxidation of sulphide minerals such as pyrite and the formation of sulphuric acid. This is known as Acid Mine Drainage and when it decants into water sources, as it has in parts of South Africa, it creates major environmental problems.

With South Africa firing up new coal power stations to meet its energy demands, the problem of polluted mine water is likely to persist.

A working river: irrigation

Even though the lower reaches of the Orange River, stretching from where the Vaal River meets the Orange River to the mouth in Alexander Bay, is a dry area, crops such as grapes, pistachios, citrus, pecans and vegetables are grown in a green strip irrigated by the river.

In this section of the river, commercial agricultural accounts for 94 percent of the current total water use, according to figures from South Africa’s water affairs department.

Farmers around Kakamas are allocated and charged for water based on a quota system, which allocates a certain amount of water per hectare to each farmer.

This places the onus on the farmer not to exceed his allocation and while it can be roughly determined whether farmers are abusing the system through the amount of electricity being used – as this indicates the amount of water they are pumping – insiders acknowledge that the system is hard to monitor and open to abuse.

South Africa still faces the headache of dealing with illegal water extraction used for irrigation, with the equivalent of 200 million cubic metres unaccounted for each year.

Despite jobs being involved, the South African government is moving to shut down these illegal irrigation operations because there isn’t enough water in the system to allow for it.

The issues raised by three of the biggest users of water in the Orange-Senqu system – industry, mining and agriculture – speak to the challenge of managing the resource in a water-scarce environment. Having enough water to support development needs, while also tackling environmental concerns, issues of access to water and future threats posed by climate change are all factors that need to be balanced.

With the Orange-Senqu river basin home to nearly 16-million people spread across Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, the effective management of the resource is crucial to the well-being of the region.

*This article is the first in a special series on the Orange-Senqu River.

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
MASERU, Sep 18 2009 (IPS)

The Orange-Senqu River has a one million square kilometre basin that covers Lesotho, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. The water it provides is crucial to industry in South Africa, but is also relied on by farmers and domestic users.

Thamae: 'ORASECOM provides a platform with which the countries can discuss and consult on the best way of addressing disparities.' Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

IPS: What are some of the common problems across the four member countries when it comes to water? LENKA THAMAE: The principal one is water scarcity – the fact that the river system is already very heavily developed and supplies the economic heartland of South Africa. The rainfall region of the system reflects very limited input over a very large area.

The other element is to do with water quality. Limitations are brought about by a system that is highly developed. This relates to trying to maintain a respectable level of good quality water while supplying a variety of users.

One of the other problems is to do with catchment degradation. It causes serious problems in terms of infrastructure.

The other element is that of environmental requirements. The river has been extensively developed, but there is more understanding that to maintain environmental integrity and for livelihoods you need to be releasing water, in a way trying to maintain the natural system.

IPS: South Africa is the largest water user in the basin: What concerns do the other countries have about access to water? LT: Essentially the context is that South Africa under the apartheid system was an isolated economy. In that regard they developed natural resources to the extent that they could be resilient to isolation. Because water resources are one of the drivers for economic development, it's inevitable that as one moves to a more regional approach to economic development that water resources are one of the elements that need to be addressed to find ways to utilise the resources more equitably.

ORASECOM provides a platform with which the countries can discuss and consult on the best way of addressing disparities. The water has been extensively developed in South Africa which means there are limited options for the countries in the region. At the same time we are moving to a more regional approach.

IPS: Since it was formed in 2000, what work has ORASECOM been engaged in? LT: One of the first areas of work ORASECOM had to focus on was to agree on policies and procedures for the structure of ORASECOM. The next area was to agree on working areas that were related to the agreement itself (which was) to advise member states. One of these areas is to develop the institution, another to conduct studies that generate sufficient information for ORASECOM to be able to advise states and the other to come up with a basin-wide management system.

IPS: So moving forward, what is ORASECOM aiming to do? LT: Moving forward since 2004/05, some of the key pieces of work that ORASECOM has been focused on is the establishment of a secretariat. ORASECOM also decided to set as a target the formulation of a basin-wide water resources management plan by 2012. In order to reach that target one of the key elements is to develop some level of common understanding in the development and management of the system.

IPS: ORASECOM has been engaged in a variety of studies related to water. What are some of the most important areas being looked at? LT: All the studies are to try and establish a common understanding of the river system. We have done studies on groundwater potential, especially looking at where Namibia, Botswana and South Africa meet, to understand the potential. The outcome is essentially that there is limited development potential because of water quality (salinity), the state of some of the aquifers and because of the fact that some of the communities are quite sparse so development in terms of large-scale projects might be limited.

The other study is on the rehabilitation of wetlands in the Lesotho Highlands where the issue is that Lesotho has been experiencing extensive degradation of areas in the river system. The idea here as a recommendation was to look at different approaches to rehabilitating the wetlands.

We have also done studies looking at marginal waters – recycling water , desalination and looking at some of the potentials. Recommendations include that it would help for some of the sites to look at reuse and treatment of water.

IPS: How does ORASECOM relate to other river basin organisations in the region? LT: We relate very closely to river basin organisations that involve member countries of ORASECOM (such as) the Limpopo basin, the Okavango, and the Zambezi. Lessons learnt get transferred.

The other level of relationship is with all the other basins that fall under the SADC who have signed the Protocol on Shared Watercourses.

The third level of relationship is through membership of the African Network of Basin Organisations (ANBO), an organisation which tries to promote best practice in river basin management in Africa.

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
CAPE TOWN, Sep 10 2009 (IPS)

For Katriena Anthony, being four months pregnant comes with hazards particular to her living conditions.

Maternal, neonatal, and child health services in South Africa still fail poor women and children, recent research says. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS


She has no electricity or running water, and every morning she has to walk long distances to collect wood, while water for drinking and cooking must be carried to her home from a nearby tap in a plastic bucket.


On a morning in late August, she is about to embark on a visit to the state clinic for a check-up on her second pregnancy, and has been lucky enough to get a lift.


She says usually such a visit would involve a one-hour walk there and back, because the ten rand ($1.25) needed for a taxi is not always available in the household budget.


Later on in her pregnancy, if there is an urgent need to get to hospital, she says she can call an ambulance or pay someone with a car 50 rand ($6.25) to take her to hospital; if she doesn’t have the money, she’ll have to borrow it somewhere.

Another woman in the settlement, also four months pregnant, says she is suffering from tuberculosis. She was diagnosed about a month ago after suffering a continuous cough, she says, and is now on medication, but complains about her living conditions.


”We don’t have toilets and we have to walk in the mountains to get wood. It’s not good. The wind blows through the shack and it floods when it rains.”


Both women are receiving regular health care in a province that has one of the better health systems in the country, but rural women with poor living conditions are more at risk of pregnancy complications.

 
Maternal health has been under the spotlight in South Africa after an analysis of maternal deaths was released in July showing an increase in the country’s maternal mortality rate (MMR).


Over 4,000 maternal deaths were reported in ‘Saving Mothers 2005-2007: Fourth Report on Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths in South Africa’, a 20 percent rise from the 3,406 deaths in the previous three-year period.


The top three causes of death were non-pregnancy related infections caused mainly by AIDS (43.7 percent), complications of hypertension (15.7 percent) and obstetric haemorrhage (12.4 percent).


Researchers found that nearly four out of every 10 deaths (38.4 percent) were avoidable. They identified non-attendance and delayed attendance as common problems, together with poor transport facilities, lack of health care facilities and lack of appropriately trained staff.


This report was followed by the publication of a Lancet study in August on the health of South Africa’s mothers and babies, which said poverty and poor conditions in rural areas and urban townships partly explained the situation.


”Poor women and children bore the brunt of the injustices of the apartheid regime. Our analysis shows that maternal, neonatal, and child health services still fail them and that an estimated total of 76,600 women, neonates, and children die unnecessarily every year,” the report concluded.


Marije Versteeg, Project Director of the Rural Health Advocacy Project, said factors in maternal health included the inability to pay for transport due to high levels of poverty, unemployment in rural areas and a shortage of health care professionals. 
”Hospitals don’t have enough staff to monitor women in labour. There are districts where professional nurses can’t be appointed, because there is no interest,” she said.


With HIV/Aids – along with improved reporting – blamed as the reason for the increase, the ‘Saving Mothers’ report noted that the institutional maternal mortality rate of women who were HIV infected was almost ten times that of HIV-negative women.

The Lancet study notes that the MMR for HIV-negative women is 34 per 100,000 live births, similar to middle-income countries such as Brazil, Argentina, and Thailand, with the MMR for HIV-infected women also almost ten times higher. 
Versteeg said if rural women didn’t access clinics for health services due to issues of affordability, they also missed out on health promotion and risked being less aware of services intended to prevent prevention of mother to child transmission PMTCT of HIV.


Stigma attached to HIV and AIDS also led to non-disclosure and a subsequent missing out on PMTCT treatment. 
Professor Sue Fawcus, vice chairperson of the National Committee on Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths, which produced the ‘Saving Mothers’ report, said it was “quite clear” that the provinces with the bigger rural base – KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape and Limpopo – had the higher rates of maternal mortality.


Fawcus puts the increase in deaths down to a mixture of both HIV/AIDS and better reporting. “I think HIV/AIDS has been a big problem for us,” she says, pointing out that looking only at HIV negative deaths paints a far more positive picture.


”This illustrates that HIV has been a big challenge in trying to achieve it (the Millennium Development Goals),” she says, but adds that improvements can be made because South Africa has better health financing compared to some other countries.


Versteeg calls for the district health system to be strengthened, and for more funding as well as more efficient spending of current funding.


Researchers that undertook the Lancet study estimate that interventions to save child lives would cost US$1.5 billion per year, or 24 percent of public sector health expenditure. 
This would also have benefits in reducing maternal deaths and put South Africa on track to meeting both the fourth and fifth MDG.


”The costs are affordable and the key gap is leadership and effective implementation at every level of the health system, including national and local accountability for service provision,” they wrote.


The ‘Saving Mothers’ report concludes with a quote from the 1999-2001 report, which noted that deficiencies in fulfilling the expectations of mothers to deliver a healthy child and watch that child grow needed to be “urgently addressed”.


The 2005-2007 report concludes simply: “Unfortunately this, with the notable exception of women dying from complications of hypertension in pregnancy, has not come to pass. We will have to redouble our efforts.”

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
BREEDE RIVER, South Africa, Aug 29 2009 (IPS)

It’s early spring in the fertile Breede River farming region, with the fruit orchards a blur of pink blossoms and the first green shoots starting to sprout in the vineyards, but for household gardener Ishmael Shiki it’s been a bad start to the growing season.

If he had more land, household gardener Ishmael Shiki would grow potatoes and onions to make more money. Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

Now he will have to restock his chicken coop from scratch.

Shiki and his wife Hilda Ngxongxela live in the Mandela Square shack settlement outside Montague, one of a string of farming towns in the Breede River valley, three hours drive from Cape Town.

As Ngxongxela prises a turnip just bigger than a golf ball out of the ground and squeezes the shrivelled leaves from the bulb, it’s clear that producing food for household consumption from the hard, dry ground is a struggle.

“It’s not easy to get the best from it but we do,” shrugs Ngxongxela.

Before they started the garden in 2003, Ngxongxela says she and her husband survived on seasonal work in agricultural factories.

Ngxongxela estimates the garden brings in about 500 rand per month, a bit over 60 dollars. Produce is sold to the community and farm workers who visit the town on the weekend, but Ngxongxela highlights the lack of a larger market as a frustration. Shiki says he believes he could make more money from growing potatoes and onions, but does not have the land to do so.

The garden is one of 220 home gardens in the area started by the Rural Women’s Association, whose founder Dulcie Wingaard says it’s a constant struggle to find support for the project, obtain enough seeds for the gardeners and access sufficient land.

The need is great, she says, brandishing a thick wad of paper listing the names of those her association has helped feed.

Two years ago a household survey of the area by the Trust for Community Outreach and Education (TCOE) found that 72 percent of 2,668 respondents indicated that there were times in the last year when they had not had enough to eat.

TCOE researcher Boyce Tom says the main constraints to household food security remain. The seasonal employment provided by the local economy has not changed, leaving many without work for large parts of the year. Not everyone has a home garden, while the gardens themselves are “tentative”.

With some estimates putting the number of people evicted from farms since 1994 at close to a million, access to land remains a pressing concern for communities like Mandela Square, the likes of which have sprung up on the outskirts of rural towns.

In Robertson, another town 25 kilometres away, Jeffery Mpingelwane’s herd of cattle has dwindled from 24 to 13 head.

He used to live on a piece of commonage with his cattle, but the land has since been used for a land reform project for which he did not qualify. As a result he has moved into a shack in Robertson’s Nkqubela township.

From there he earns money running a shop selling household goods and also draws a pension from the municipality, where he worked as a tractor operator for 20 years.

In the summer months, he says, he is able to earn an income selling milk from his cows to the community at a little under 50 cents per litre.

“The people buy, they are crying for milk,” he says.

But the margins are small and from the money he earns he must pay his two sons who help him, cover the cost of petrol for his bakkie and pay for medicines should any of the cows fall ill.

Without land and capital he can’t even think of selling milk to the mainstream dairy industry as this would require purchasing a milking machine and building a shed.

While Mpingelwane wants land, Stuurman Posholi has land but bemoans the problems it has caused him.

A small-scale farmer in Robertson, Posholi explains how land he was allocated as part of a land reform project is useless because of an intermittent water supply.

“We did get land, but it is dead land,” he says. Without sufficient water, he says he cannot irrigate the land to grow feed for his cattle. Without the feed, his cattle die. He lost 17 last year, he says.

As a result, he says he is not farming the land and keeps his remaining 23 head of cattle elsewhere. With no money coming in, a Land Bank loan looms large.

To bring money in, he is selling off his herd, one by one. This year he says he has sold three head of cattle that bought in 750 dollars, less the 14 percent that went to the auctioneer.

“I don’t want to sell but I have to because I need the money,” he says.

Tom identifies a general problem in addressing food security: land reform, in his view, does not have a strong enough focus on the people at the base. As a result, the selection of beneficiaries for projects is flawed, and many people are drawn in who have no background or interest in farming.

He identifies another problem as the high cost of land. Government has acquired land for South Africa’s redistribution with great difficulty, as it keeps strictly to buying land made available on the open market.

Tom also calls for an audit of municipality-held commonage land, arguing that there is little understanding of how much there is and how it can be used to settle land needs.

South Africa has a new Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, however, whose focus is to ensure sustainable land and agrarian reform that contributes to rural development and food security.

Department spokesperson Sandile Nene says this involves specific support for small-scale farming, land reform projects and food gardens.

Commonage grants are available to municipalities to acquire land for this purpose and provide infrastructure to ensure land is usable.

Nene said the department’s role was set to become “more pronounced” with a view to responding to the Millennium Development Goal of halving the total number of 2.2 million food insecure households by 2014.

For Mpingelwane, the land is there – it just hasn’t come his way. He says many have given up trying to access land because of the frustrations, but his passion for farming is still there.

“If I have got land and I already have cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens I think it is a good start for me to start farming,” he says, “I don’t think I’m going to be a rich man, but it can maybe put me at a better level of life.”

Excerpt:

By Patrick Burnett
CAPE TOWN, Feb 21 2009 (IPS)

"When my belly is crying I must fill it. I can sit on the side of the road and beg for bread, but there is the bread right there," says Hahn Goliath, a fisherman in the small village of Doring Bay on South Africa's West Coast, as he points furiously at the Atlantic Ocean.

Mers Klaase has been fishing in Doring Bay since 1968, but struggles to make a living. "The problem is the law. How can you make money if you cannot sell your fish?" Credit: Patrick Burnett/IPS

Largely excluded from the government's fishing rights allocation process, they are able to catch fish – their daily bread – only on a recreational fishing permit, which makes it illegal to sell their catch. The situation has led to worsening coastal poverty.

Goliath linked the inability of fishers to earn a living from the sea to households breaking up, children dropping out of school and teenage pregnancies.

"At 14 children stand up to their parents and tell them they can't tell them what to do anymore. And when their parents can't provide them with food, how can they expect respect from their children?"

Subsistence fishers were hoping that a new government policy, the Draft Policy for the Allocation and Management of Medium-Term Subsistence Fishing Rights, would address their plight.

A task team representing subsistence fishers, which was appointed by South African environmental minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk in 2007, were involved in developing the policy. But the draft policy released in December 2008 has been rejected by the task team.

The deal breaker was that the policy says allocation of fishing rights to subsistence fishers is a challenge in that marine resources have already been allocated to commercial fisheries.

In the case of West Coast Rock Lobster, for example, which is the bread and butter of communities like Doring Bay (Doring is Afrikaans for "thorn") on the West Coast, the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) for the species in 2007/2008 was 2,571 tons, a 10 percent decline from the previous year.

This allocation, worth has been estimated at $34 million in value, was split between 1,754 tonnes to the offshore industry, 560 tonnes for the near shore and 257 tonnes for the recreational industry, according to Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT) figures.

Fisheries consultancy Feike notes in A Guide to the South African Commercial Fishing Industry that the offshore fishery, which uses larger vessels in deeper waters, consists of 245 right holders – those allocated a quota out of the TAC – and sustains approximately 1,058 jobs.

Meanwhile, the near shore fishery, which still utilises basic vessels in shallow waters, supports 812 right holders and involves 3,248 jobs.

But the rub is that rights allocations were made to the offshore industry in 2006 and to the near shore sector in 2005 for a period of 10 years. The implication is that the only place where unallocated tonnage can be found for subsistence fishers is out of the the recreational allocation of 257 tonnes. The draft policy confirms this, saying that because West Coast Rock Lobster is over-subscribed, a reduction of the recreational catch by up to 50 percent will be necessary to accommodate subsistence fishers.

Fishing activists see this as a signal that subsistence fishers can expect the leftovers – 128.5 tons out of the recreational catch of 257 tons – rather than a system that would make space for them by taking tonnage out of the offshore sector and allocating that to the near shore, which supports more people.

Line fish species are also described in the draft policy as being "under tremendous pressure", with no scope for additional catches using ski boats and other vessels.

Artisanal Fisheries Association chairman Andy Johnstone said: "It's like giving someone a plate of food and then they find out there's no food on the plate."

He said the policy did not represent the interests of fishers. "It's not our policy. The whole thing is we don't want the quota system."

The quota system allocates a specific amount of fish to individual fishers, but failure to secure a quota means exclusion from making a living from the sea. The policy makes clear there isn't enough for all subsistence fishers.

Moeniba Isaacs, a senior researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, agrees that unless there are political moves to incorporate more of the offshore allocation in the near shore allocation, fishers will get the scraps.

She believes South Africa must look elsewhere to find a solution on how to address the needs of fishing communities.

She points to a co-operative system in Vietnam and other Southern African countries such as Mozambique and Angola, who have well-developed policies for subsistence fishers.

She argues for a hybrid commercial and communal system that would create an exclusive economic zone for small fishers around their communities.

A co-operative would market produce on their behalf and the money earned would return to the community, who would decide how to spend the revenue.

Johnstone advocates another system based on "co-ownership and co-responsibility" which would involve all roleplayers, including government, fishers and fishing communities.

Known as the Territorial User Rights Fishery and Co-management System (TURF), Johnstone said the framework was developed in the 1990s by artisinal fishers. It proposes that management conditions would vary from zone to zone.

Key to the approach would be that a defined group of fishers would have exclusive rights to a geographical inshore zone that would exclude commercial ventures.

To ensure sustainability, the system proposes a register of catches in specific zones and a partnership between local knowledge and science.

But, Isaacs said, alternatives "cannot happen without the political will", which she argues is lacking both nationally and at regional level, where there is a lack of acceptance of issues like food security and local economic development.

Andre Share, the chief director of marine resource management in the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT), maintains that the draft policy is not set in stone.

"Any member of the public, as well as other stakeholders, now have an opportunity to provide such comments on the draft policy before it is being finalised."

Share said marine resources were "finite" and the department would have to select deserving fishers.

He said in any formalised system where access to finite resources was limited there would be difficulties, but the department would endeavour to ensure that bona fide subsistence fishers were accommodated.

Fishing sources, however, argue that government has backed itself into a corner when it comes to engaging with alternative models. In order to provide adequately for subsistence fishers they would have to take away from existing commercial fishing allocations and risk court action as a result.

Goliath, also the Doring Bay representative for Coastal Links, an organisation representing a network of fishing communities, believes quotas do not contribute to community development because they provide an income only to a small minority.

He calls for the community to take ownership of their rights. "If we all unite and put all of it together I can see a way, especially for the local economy."

For Goliath any system must be about gaining an acknowledgement for subsistence fishers so that "our children have food and education so that we can win back the respect that we earn from our children. We are not here to become millionaires, but we want government to acknowledge us as fishermen. This is our manner of living."

*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ –International Federation of Environmental Journalists­ for Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org)

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