Across South Africa’s rural landscape, thousands of hectares of fertile land lie unused. Irrigation systems have collapsed, water no longer reaches crops reliably, and many farmers lack the support needed to keep production going.
This is visible in one of the country’s most impoverished provinces, the Eastern Cape, where more than 53% of the communal land that has irrigation installed is currently unused. (Most of this land falls under communal tenure and is farmed by smallholders on fragmented plots where they grow produce for household consumption and to sell at local markets.) Despite significant public investment over several decades, many irrigation schemes have fallen into disrepair, water delivery has become unreliable, and large areas of farmland have been abandoned.
