According to an analysis published on Farming Portal and republished from The Conversation, giving emerging farmers water rights is not enough to make South African farming fairer. Water rights, the legal entitlement to draw water from a river, dam or underground source, were denied to Black farmers under apartheid-era land and water laws, which also barred them from owning productive land and forced many into overcrowded Bantustans with poor infrastructure.
Since 1994, the analysis says, South Africa has tried to correct this partly by granting water licences to Black farmers and encouraging joint ventures with established, mainly white, commercial farmers. The researchers asked whether those partnerships deliver fair access and viable businesses. They interviewed 34 commercial and emerging farmers in joint ventures in the Great Fish and Lower Sundays River area of the Eastern Cape, a region with many land reform projects, large citrus farms that export oranges and lemons, and an advanced irrigation canal system.
What the partnerships delivered
Through the partnerships, many emerging farmers got irrigation infrastructure for the first time, including canals, pumps and water from nearby dams. But the schemes were designed for established operations, and emerging farmers struggled to afford them. They also remained dependent on their commercial partners for finance, expertise and market access.
Why water is not enough
Emerging farmers told the researchers that commercial partners often controlled financial decisions, production planning, marketing and investment. They were billed for water from the moment they began using it, often before any harvest, and water and compliance costs could reach R750,000 (about US$46,300) just to get started. Citrus takes seven or more years to produce its first harvest. Some farmers lost the water rights they had been allocated because they could not pay. Many lacked irrigation infrastructure and machinery and had to rent equipment from their partners, which raised their costs and their dependence. Climate variability, rising electricity, irrigation and fertiliser costs, and a lack of collateral or cash flow for commercial credit made independent investment almost impossible.
Commercial farmers described farming as complex and costly, citing compliance audits, rising labour and diesel costs, volatile international prices and the effect of COVID-19 on exports. Keeping their own businesses profitable, they said, left little time or resources to build emerging farmers’ independence.
What the authors recommend
The authors want government support, including grants, infrastructure and extension officers, to be better coordinated, because interviewees found it inconsistent and unevenly distributed. They say irrigation water pricing should reflect that new farmers earn little for roughly the first seven years while remaining economically sustainable, and that joint ventures should set out how emerging farmers will gain the skills and experience to take over management. Partnerships, they say, should deliberately build local capacity rather than long-term dependency.
The article notes that since the research began, the government has introduced a new water pricing strategy that gives emerging farmers time to pay off water bills. The authors call this a step in the right direction but say it addresses only one part of the problem.
Why access and productive use are two separate problems
The gap the analysis describes, between holding a legal water entitlement and being able to farm productively with it, shows that transferring a right is a single administrative event, while building the capital, skills and infrastructure to use it is a multi-year process that a one-time allocation does not fund. Counting licences issued tells you how much has been legally reallocated; it does not tell you how much of that water is reaching a crop, which is what affects a farmer’s income and the businesses that supply and finance them. For businesses in the agricultural value chain, the same findings point to demand for financing, equipment and technical support, though the research itself does not size that market.
