African Wildlife and Environment Issue 65

CONSERVATION

CONSERVATION

For all these reasons one would think that Cape Town would be actively working to keep the PHA as pristine farmland, and rigorously preventing pollution of the valuable groundwater. But you would be completely wrong: not only is the City working extremely hard to push through a development of more than 50 000 middle income houses, schools, shopping centres and a private prison that would permanently pave over a huge part of the PHA (thereby forever preventing it from functioning as an aquifer recharge area), it also turns a blind eye to daily incidents of dumping and pollution of the ground water. It is these two things that the Save the PHA Campaign is working so hard

the outcome. This is an extremely dangerous precedent, since what the City is implying is that the only consideration to be taken into account in spatial planning, is what the current mayoral committee thinks is a good idea. Imagine the implications: the mayoral committee decides that some of the historic vineyards of Constantia would make a perfect high-income cluster development (after all, there is much more income for the City in 2 000 multi-million Rand homes than a few vineyards). Those vineyards are classified as agricultural land and they have considerable heritage value. There is legislation in place to prevent their

Why should you be fighting to save THE PHA?

For the past five years a bitter battle has been waged between the City of Cape Town and a small group of volunteers, who make up for their lack of resources with tenacity. Most South Africans know nothing about this fight, but it is critical to all of us since it is essentially about how much power we hand over to our municipalities to irrevocably destroy natural resources.

Tracy Ledger

destruction, but the City simply ignores all the requirements in this regard and proceeds to bulldoze the area. As citizens of Cape Town you would discover that you had absolutely no legal recourse, because the City has simply taken for itself the authority to override all those checks and balances. And then there is the water. The residents of Cape Town are learning very quickly that the City has failed appallingly in this regard. Cape Town has been growing rapidly over the past ten years – and thus the demand for water has increased substantially, and drought is not unknown in the Western Cape. Despite this information, the City has failed to design or implement any kind of long-term water strategy. If the city is struggling with water now,

Much of Cape Town’s fresh food is produced in the PHA (Photographs: Save the PHA Campaign)

to prevent. But there is even more at stake in this fight than to save a unique and valuable resource for future generations. Throughout its programme of planning to ‘develop’ the PHA, the City of Cape Town has bumped up against the checks and balances that have been put in place precisely to prevent this kind of irrational and dangerous activity. As just one example, legislation requires that if a municipality wishes to rezone agricultural land that has been deemed to be ‘high-value’, it must obtain permission to do so from the Minister of the national Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF). Since the PHA is deemed ‘high-value’, the City of Cape Town did apply to DAFF for such permission. Twice. And their request was denied. Twice. The City’s response is what should concern all of us: the executive merely decided that they did not need to be bound by the legislation around high-value agricultural land if they did not want to; that they could ignore the Minister’s ruling and simply proceed. This is exactly what they have done. And it is not the only national and provincial planning safeguard that they have simply ignored because they did not like

what will it do in five or ten years’ time, when the demand is even higher? Cape Town’s economy is critically dependent on water – an exacerbation of the water crisis has the real potential to turn it into a ghost town. Despite all this, the City is determined to destroy forever one of its most important water resources. We have to make them stop. We have to prevent them from eroding our rights in terms of the checks and balances around natural and heritage resources that are designed to keep these safe for our children and grandchildren. And we have to do it now, before it really is too late.

The PHA is a unique agricultural heritage site

Firstly –what are they fighting about? They are fighting over the Philippi Horticultural Area (the PHA), an area of about 3 000 hectares of very high value farmland located within the borders of the City of Cape Town. The PHA is globally unique, for a number of reasons. It represents an incredible urban agriculture resource, with the ability to produce a significant amount of the City of Cape Town’s fresh food requirements. Given the high level of food insecurity in the city, the advantages of having such a huge agricultural asset on the doorstep are considerable. And then there is the water. The PHA sits above the massive Cape Flats Aquifer and is the main recharge area for that aquifer. The water table is only a metre or so below the surface. The implications of this huge fresh water resource are considerable: it means that much of the produce

grown in the PHA can be irrigated all year round, making it a very secure source of food. Secondly, the aquifer is a potentially vital source of ground water for the City (which currently does not utilise any ground water as a meaningful part of its water supply strategy). Estimates are that the aquifer could provide as much as a third of the drinking water requirements for the City, a vital consideration in a place where the signs above the highway tell you that there is less than a 100 days’ worth of water left in the dams that supply Cape Town. But the aquifer can only recharge itself every rainy season if it remains farmland, and the water can only maintain its current quality if there is (enforced) legislation to prevent its pollution by industrial and other waste.

Dr Tracy Ledger Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences University of the Witwatersrand Author of An Emply Plate (Jacana) www.facebook.com/Tracy-Ledger-Food-and-Social Justice-121397028342459/

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9 | African Wildlife & Environment | 65 (2017)