South Africa’s Eastern Cape province has several million hectares of open land in rural areas, not privately owned but held in trust by the state on behalf of communities. The people who live there use it mainly for grazing livestock, subsistence farming, and sometimes hunting. A common misperception is that the grassy, rolling hills will take care of themselves. But these rangelands degrade for many reasons, making them unusable for the small-scale and landless farmers who need communal land for their animals.
Agricultural scholar Mhlangabezi Slayi researches practical ways of preserving rangeland ecosystems so that farmers can continue to graze livestock there. In his latest study, he worked with 150 people from rural Eastern Cape villages to find out how they planned to restore the rangelands closest to them.
