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From racial to class apartheid: South Africa's frustrating decade of freedom
Monthly Review, March, 2004 by Patrick Bond
Moving to the environment, it is fair to assess South African ecology today as in worse condition, in many crucial respects--water and soil resources mismanagement, South Africa's contribution to global warming, fisheries, industrial toxics, and genetic modification--than during apartheid. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project has become the highest-profile example of third world development corruption. Africa's biggest dam supplies water to Johannesburg from the Lesotho mountains, and further dams are being built even though government officials admit they are unnecessary, and despite destructive environmental consequences. In spite of water scarcity there is little sign that these water development schemes will help, since the extremely high costs of water transfer are deterring consumption by poor people. The wealthiest urban (mainly white) families enjoy swimming pools and English gardens, which means that in some of the most hedonistic suburbs per capita water consumption is 30 times greater each day than in low-income townships, some of whose residents do the gardening and domestic work for whites. Rural (black) women stand in line for hours at communal taps in the parched former bantustan areas. The location of natural surface and groundwater remains skewed towards white farmers due to apartheid land dispossession. With fewer than 2 percent of arable plots redistributed (as against a five-year target of 30 percent), Pretoria's neoliberal land policy has conclusively failed to redress this problem.
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Other examples of residual apartheid ecology could be cited, including numerous unresolved conflicts over natural land reserves (the displacement of indigenous people continues), the deleterious impacts of industrialization on biodiversity, insufficient protection of endangered species, and generous state policies favoring genetic modification in commercial agriculture. Marine regulatory systems are overstressed and hotly contested by European and East Asian fishing trawlers, as well as by local medium-scale commercial fishing firms fending off new waves of small-scale black rivals. Expansion of gum and pine timber plantations, largely for pulp exports to East Asia, remains extremely damaging, not only because of grassland and organic forest destruction--leading to soil adulteration and far worse flood damage downriver, as Mozambique suffered in 2000-2001-but also due to the spread of alien invasive plants into water catchments across the country. One constructive, high-profile state program has so far slowed but not reversed the advance of alien invasives.
Thanks to accommodating state policies, South African commercial agriculture remains extremely reliant upon fertilizers and pesticides, with virtually no attention given to potential organic farming markets. The government's failure to prevent toxic dumping and incineration has led to a nascent but portentous group of mass tort (class action) lawsuits that may reach beyond asbestos victims to residents who suffer persistent pollution in several extremely toxic pockets (South Durban, Sasolburg, and Steel Valley). In these efforts, the environmental justice movement almost invariably fights both corporations and Pretoria.
