allAfrica.com: South Africa: Project to Clear Vegetation Faces Huge Challenges (Page 1 of 2)

PRISCILLA Motloung has been at work since 7.30am. She is clearing cut vegetation out of a dry river bank and piling it up for later collection. For this she earns R42 a day.

Still, for Motloung, a mother of three with a husband who works only part time, the pay - up from R40 when she began in 2006 - is better than when she had no job at all.

"It's better than nothing," she says.

Motloung, from the township of Ratanda outside Heidelberg in Gauteng, is one of 32 people employed under the LandCare programme to clear alien plants from a 67ha block of land at a campsite and conference centre 15km outside Heidelberg. Motloung says the job has taught her first aid, health and safety and life skills.

It is ironic that the alien vegetation being removed from this site is mainly Australian bluegum and wattle, since SA's LandCare programme is adopted from an earlier Australian version. Last fiscal year, the national government funded 95 projects to the tune of R46,7m. Provincial and local governments also fund them. The South African variant, in operation since 1997, focuses on job creation, in contrast to its predecessor, which revolved around environmental rehabilitation by volunteers.

The three-year project at Sonfields Christian Camp has a budget of R853000 for 2007-08. Conditional grant funding from the agriculture department goes to LandCare projects that meet criteria of the Extended Public Works Programme -- namely, job creation, poverty alleviation and skills training. LandCare projects fall into the categories of soil, water, veld and coast. In larger provinces with more agriculture, LandCare projects teach skills to emerging farmers and make subsistence farmers more productive.

The idea behind LandCare is that local communities identify tasks that will benefit the environment in their own area and seek public funding to perform them. It began when farmers in the Australian state of Victoria in 1986 got together to plant trees on cleared land to hold back a rising water table and increasing salination. In SA, early attempts did not work. The agriculture department found tasks and then hired people to do them, rather than the motivation coming from the ground.

"For the first five to six years, the nature of the programme was not satisfactory," says Dennis Garrity, director-general of the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Centre and chairman of LandCare International. "It was made into a massive handout programme. They got a perverse set of expectations going, which was difficult to reverse -- that government would be providing handouts to farmers and were doing it on an individual basis to carry out certain predetermined agricultural improvements the government decided were the right thing to do."

Since the early 2000s, however, the government has done much to stimulate local initiatives, Garrity says.

But criticisms remain. In the Heidelberg project that employs Motloung, the implementing agency is the Lesedi Municipality. But Theo de Jager, the president of farmers' body Agri Limpopo, says private expertise is needed, particularly in farming projects. At a time of soaring food prices and farmland lying unused, this is crucial.

"By this we might overcome the problems of lack of capacity in the government departments," he says. "We can also spread the possibility of reconstruction of the agriculture industry across a wider base by privatising."

Masingita Chauke, of the agriculture department's LandCare secretariat, says: "We have seen that with some implementing agencies, some of the NGOs, they take a very big piece of the cake and very little is left for the community. Some take R5000 an hour. They want to suck the little that we have. What is left for the community?"

Piet Stoop, land manager of the Sonfields site, owned by the Pretoria-based Eastside Community Church, is pleased with the project.

"Our biggest benefit is that we'll have running water again. They reckon within two years we'll start having water again. And we'll have a dam again".

Once the alien plants are dealt with, there is the possibility of another project to replant native vegetation. The question of costs then arises. Melinda Swift, director of the Gauteng provincial agriculture department says the benefit from getting water flowing in the tributary justifies the three years of public spending to clear the privately owned Sonfields site.

However, one unsolved issue is who pays for maintenance of the site once the clearing is done. Any further work, such as replanting with indigenous vegetation, would have to be shouldered at least by the landowner.

"That's one of our biggest challenges," Swift says.

While landowners benefiting from LandCare projects undertake to maintain the property in its rehabilitated state, the provincial and municipal authorities have little ability to enforce those commitments.

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