This is a summary of the first of five cross-cutting themes outlined in the book Contested Karoo: Interdisciplinary perspectives on change and continuity in South Africa’s drylands, edited by Sherryl Walker and M. Timm Hoffman. For an introductory post summarising all five themes, click here. Posts on the remaining four themes will follow soon.
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In a concluding chapter, Walker and Hoffman write that, after many years during which the Karoo was regarded as an ‘empty space’, suited only to sheep farming, profound shifts in land use are under way which raises important questions about its future.
Powerful state and corporate interests are showing unprecedented interest in extracting as much value as possible from the Karoo’s natural resource base, encompassing not only its mineral riches as before, but also its renewable and non-renewable energy resources, its clear skies, its sparsely populated rangelands, and its unique biodiversity.
Throughout the 20th century, by far the most extensive land use in the Karoo was that of commercial sheep and wool production on private, white-owned farms, with pockets of small–scale livestock farming persisting in the former ‘coloured’ reserves in Namaqualand.
While livestock farming still prevails in much of the region, the nature of production and long-established tenure relations are shifting, and the pre-eminence of commercial farming is being challenged by new land uses proliferating across the region.
Increasingly, wind and solar farms, which were entirely absent only a few decades ago, dominate selected Karoo landscapes, with solar farms especially prevalent in the north, and wind farms concentrated along the escarpment and in the south.
The globally networked Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope has a large terrestrial footprint in the Northern Cape Karoo.Mining, which has a long history of extreme social and environmental damage in the Karoo, is also set to expand.
Despite strong opposition from farmers and ecologists, fracking appears poised to become a major extractive industry in the Karoo, with significant threats to its water resources, general environmental health and land-based livelihoods.
The authors write: ‘The renewed interest in exploiting the region’s natural resource base is duelling contestations over land and authority. It is also fuelling debates around what sustainability means in this context, the scale at which impacts should be measured, and where the power to determine the answers to these questions lie. What this study makes clear … is that the interests of most people for whom the Karoo is home are being subsumed within economic and political agendas that are being set outside the region.’
While resource extraction can promote aggregated economic growth and potentially reduce local poverty if its benefits are widely distributed, it regularly leads to environmental degradation and higher levels of poverty.
Unless these developments are consciously integrated with the regional economy, their destabilising social impacts addressed and natural resources carefully managed, local people are vulnerable to further marginalisation.
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Square Kilometre Array billboard, Carnarvon, 2016. Picture: Davide Chinigò.
Not all the new land uses are directly about the accumulation of capital and the externalisation of profits. In the case of astronomy, the investments in both the SKA and the optical observatory outside Sutherland have been supported by the state in the interests of advancing a national science agenda. The rollout of renewable energy projects, while driven by international corporations, is also seen as essential for South Africa’s energy transition away from coal-fired electricity. Yet the power imbalances in the ways in which these seemingly non-exploitative developments are unfolding are very similar to those more commonly attributed to conventionally extractivist industries, such as mining.
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Some local actors are benefiting from their association with the external investors and political players driving the land use changes. Some of the community development initiatives associated with the renewable energy and conservation sectors may also help to improve livelihood opportunities and social wellbeing, but this will require a more empowered local citizenry.
Overall, however, the study shows that, despite the significant injection of capital, mainly in selected infrastructure around project sites, contemporary investments in the Karoo are failing to address local development needs in a systematically inclusive and sustainable way. This is consistent with global concerns around extractivism and the further marginalisation of vulnerable groups in resource frontiers.
‘Unless these concerns are addressed,’ the authors conclude, ‘the shifts in land use currently under way in the Karoo can be expected to perpetuate the history of surplus populations – a sobering example of how change and continuity are entwined in the region.’
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FEATURED IMAGE: Wind turbine blades on their way to a wind farm outside Loeriesfontein. Image: Stephanie Borchardt.