Pumping Pressure - script

The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg brings world leaders to a region that's on the verge of famine. One of the causes is poor farmers' lack of access to increasingly scarce water supplies. Governments are meeting to work out how to make things better for the poor - and that means starting with water.

Demands for water are placing mounting pressure on the environment, as countries struggle to develop their economies.

Irrigation currently accounts for more than 80% of water consumed in the developing world, while millions of people have no basic daily supply.

From Johannesburg to the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto the global water experts and politicians will be grappling with the complexities of sustainable water management. This week Earth Report travels to India and South Africa to see some of the challenges they face.

Anthony Turton - AWIRU
'The story of humans is the story of development and you cannot tell the story of development without telling the story of water'.

Barbara Schreiner - Department of Water Affairs, South Africa
'Water is it's the basis of life but it's also the basis of any economy - its very difficult to develop an economy without water. And we have really specific challenges - for example if you look Johannesburg the economic heartland of SA its here because of gold it's not because of water. Johannesburg and everything around it is here because of gold and we've actually had to import water to keep the economy of this area going'.

Anthony Turton - AWIRU
'Within about 10 to 20 years after mining had commenced the rivers started running dry.

In a relatively short space of geological time infact the twinkling of an eye in geological time we have changed our landscape and that’s the start of the story of water and development'.

Anthony Turton - AWIRU
'Around us we have a desolate almost lunar landscape and the mining that has caused this has created enormous wealth and the wealth has flown out of this country and what’s left behind now is this is - what I call the detritus of development. Whose now responsible for cleaning up the mess?'

Krugersdorp area, South Africa - gold mine slime dumps (left). More often than not, it's the poor communities living closest to the mines who are most affected by pollution.

Molekana, Limpopo Province
The community of GaMolekana to the North East of Johannesburg is protesting against a Platinum mine which arrived 10 years ago with promises of employment and compensation for land. Not only did the promises never materialise but the community lost their land, their river water and their groundwater supplies.

Maria Kubjana - Villager in Gamolekana
'Ever since the mine was established here in 1992 we started suffering shortage of water scarcity of water - the mine was pumping water from the river and then taking in large amounts, and also they had sunk deep boreholes and as a result our private household boreholes dried up - they are not yielding any water any more.'

The people of Gamolekana are demanding face to face talks with the mine managers and the local authorities - they want to be included in the decisions that affect their lives.

Villager 'The biggest other problem is that ever since the mine was established here - one of the greatest problems is that they have displaced us from our fields where we were producing food, and then they have put the mine dumps, the slime dumps the sewage from the mines onto our fields'.

On top of a slime dump - water filters down through the dump and back into the environment and water supplies.

Villagers also say that seepage from the slime dumps is now polluting the river water.

Maria Kubjana - Villager in Gamolekana
'In the passing years we get water here from the river to drink and wash, all the things, now we have no way to get water - that's why we suffer…'

For the people of Gamolekana hope could lie in South Africa's New Water Law, if it can be fully enforced. The 1998 National Water Act is designed to bring social and environmental justice by making the polluter pay - in this case the mines should be made accountable to the people whose lives are affected.

Anthony Turton - AWIRU
'Part of the story of water and development is the story of poverty and wealth creation and central to that is the story of equity - how can we create sustainable development without having equity, in my view its not sustainable'.

Reallocation
By far the largest water user in South Africa is commercial farming which uses over half of South Africa's water. By contrast nine out of every ten black farming households have no supply of irrigation water. Their lives revolve around a daily struggle to get enough water for household use. Today the arid former homeland areas present a stark contrast to the commercial farms on their doorsteps. During Apartheid white farmers owned the rights to the rivers which flowed through their lands. They were given subsidies to invest in irrigation.

Large scale irrigation in South Africa uses 52% of the water in South Africa... by contrast 9 out of ten black farming households have no irrigation water and many still struggle for basic daily supply for survival.

Barbara Schreiner - Department of Water Affairs, South Africa
'The farming community in many countries when it comes to water issues is very powerful. When 94 happened the farming community lost access to the corridors of power so we were able to bring in a lot of changes because that power base had shifted.'

Under the National Water Act the new government has become custodian of the nations water resources shifting control away from the private riparian owners. Schoeman Boerdery is the biggest producer of oranges in South Africa. 800 tonnes of oranges are processed per day on this highly intensive farm. The farm is one of the largest water users on the heavily exploited Olifants River. If everyone is to get a fair share of water in the Olifants basin there will have to be a radical transformation in the way water is allocated - who will give up their water to redress the balance?

Kallie Schoeman
'Water will have to be redistributed - if they've got to take it away from someone I hope it wouldn’t be from the farmers but I think there's a very big possibility that we will have to prove that we've utilised the water well.'

Barbara Schreiner - Department of Water Affairs, South Africa
'Its going to be difficult - we'd be fooling ourselves if we pretended we could wander in and wave a magic wand and take people's water away and give it to somebody else without a certain amount of contestation happening'.

On the ground, little has actually changed and well organised farmers are pumping and storing their full quotas of water to make sure they safeguard their licences.

Kallie Schoeman
'Not many changes have taken place as far as an irrigation farmer in this irrigation scheme is concerned except that that if you don't keep on using your water, that’s like if you don’t use it you will loose it which I think makes farmers much more wary about the real value of irrigation water.'

Most Black farmers still have no access to water. But in a rare case, a group of farmers have occupied abandoned land near to the Olifants river and neighbouring the orange farm.

Jerry Sefoloshe Penyane - Emergent Black Farmer
'In the past we have a problem as emerging black farmers because we only farmed the drylands areas - since we started to farm here because here there is water we benefited a lot, and we share the main canal up there with the big commercial farmers.'

But Jerry feels excluded from the water allocation process which is still effectively controlled by the white farmers:

Jerry
'The Hereford Irrigation board, they hold the meetings we are not included in the board so we are not sure of the water laws - but I'm sure the white commercial farmers around here they know exactly what is taking place - because they just isolate us when they go to all the meetings'.

Further downstream on the Olifants the Kruger National Park receives contaminated waste water from mines, power plants, commercial farms and 2500 dams. Kruger managers are careful to monitor the quantity and quality of water they receive.

Dr Andrew Deacon - Kruger National Park
'We've lost one or two sensitive species in this part of the Olifants River and that is a concern for us Since the National Parks Board have biodiversity as their main aim. The water's over allocated - there's too many users of the past and that will have to be rectified.'

Under the New Water Law a reserve of water should be left in the river to meet basic human needs and ecological requirements.

Dr Andrew Deacon
'Water Law is a very exciting and a very new good new thing that happens to South Africa - lets hope it works I mean it's a good idea and we did a lot of work to determine that ecological reserve to manage it might be a little bit more difficult but if theres a will theres a way'.

Environmentalists, large scale farmers and industry are all experienced in presenting strong organised lobbies to justify their claims to water. But how will the poor in the rural areas get their voices heard?

Barbara Schreiner - DWAF
'That's the million dollar question. It's very difficult - we're in the process of setting up water user associations and catchment management agencies because we're going to be decentralising water management around the country. In the process we are trying very hard to bring in disadvantaged communities, poor rural communities, but your talking about people who don't have telephones, don't have email, they don't have fax machines, they're not necessarily highly literate so it infact requires a very specific process of going out to communities and talking to them.'

Ma Tshepo Khumbane - Development Activist
'We want water for food! Yes! South Africa is for us all - it's no more a divided country of two worlds in one - the first world and the third world at one time - can those that are in the first world shake some bit of the surplus and share it with those that are marginalised and so on so that even if we don’t strike at equity we come to something where we have satisfied the basic requirements of water!'

Ma Tshepo Khumbane has dedicated her life to giving a voice to the rural poor. She mobilises families to harvest rainwater and produce their own food as the first step to development.

Her garden proves that food can be produced on the smallest of homesteads at minimal cost.

Ma Tshepo Khumbane
'When god gives, he does not discriminate he does not ask you how many pounds you have - he lets his clouds drop and quench the thirst - the clouds will drop the water. And we are saying government are you prepared to walk that distance with us to harvest that water as God gives it - we have no money - we are saying to the learned the technicians and the teachers do you have an answer for proper technology to help us catch that water in order to produce food - it is vital it's a crisis we are tired of hunger!'

Ma Tshepo on the way to Athol
'We're going to Athol, we're going to see the community of Athol. These women for me are women who despite their poverty, despite everything, have got the courage and the strength and the power to do something about their lives and shape, pave their own development.'

Greeting, singing and dancing as Earth Reporters arrive in the village of Athol, South Africa.

In 1982 Ma Tshepo began work in the drylands of the Lowveldt in the village of Athol. At that time the community had endured 3 years of drought and had eaten all their seed. But today the women of Athol are a force to be reckoned with. Despite having no regular access to water they are managing to survive (and reduce malnutrition) through dryland farming and homestead gardening, reusing every drop of rain and waste water. They are determined to get their demands for water heard.

Margaret
'Our biggest, biggest problem is water, water, water - its so difficult to survive and again we are not educated, we have been trying trying to send messages - the cry about water, because we cannot even directly write a letter or send our messages we are unable to be heard. Our problem is water, water water...'

The Athol women know exactly what they need to secure a water supply to help develop their dryland farming - they want to build a small dam to trap rain water and they are calling on the government to meet them halfway.

Margaret and the women take us to the point where they want to build the dam.

'We are going to start the project by clearing some of the land here but the main people we expect to help us is the government who have the big tractors to help speed up the process.'

'Whether or not the government help us this land here has been approved for small scale farming and with or without their help we will still put up the dam here - it will be quicker if they help us because we will be building with our bare hands.'

Ma Tshepo Khumbane
'so they never just challenge sitting down and saying bring... there's nothing that we can do that's why when they challenge they are brave because they are also not shunning responsibility. The dances we sing and everything becomes very focussed and central to the passion for water for food.'

Ma Tshepo
'Water for food movement is also looking at communities getting empowered so that they also move into the water delivery chains build their capacity to lobby and be strong and so they produce a very strong voice and that voice comes from grassroots. We are making sure that we are represented even on the highest level so that the issues that we handle on grassroot level with ourselves must also influence change of mind and change of policies.'

Barbara Schreiner
'I think there's a realisation that we've got to eradicate poverty - if your talking about white farmers and so on people do realise there will have to be changes and that their own futures are not secure if there is no change.'

Compared with the rest of the world, Africa has some way to go in developing water for small scale farming and food security. But elsewhere over the last fifty years a quiet revolution in water-use has been taking place.

Millions of enterprising farmers, in the world's drylands have tapped into underground water reserves. Arid landscapes have become breadbaskets. 97% of the world's available freshwater lies in underground aquifers. But in all the major crop-producing regions of the world the aquifers are under pressure from overpumping. According to some experts groundwater depletion could be the biggest threat to global food production.

At the Third World Water Forum in Kyoto in March, global water experts will be working on solutions such as putting a price on water use and imposing laws. But it is not always easy to translate these ideas into reality on the ground.

Dr. Tushaar Shah - International Water Management Institute
'When you try and talk about some of these solutions with farmers from an Indian village they just don't make sense to them, they don't resonate and one major reason is that they look at the water situation completely differently - an Indian farmer associates his right to water with his right to land and for the millennia this has been his perception of the rights to water.'

Following Independence in 1947, irrigation became a major development priority for India and food grain production quadrupled. In Northern Gujarat, where rainfall is meagre, the Mehsana district became a major crop producing region by pumping water from a huge aquifer.

Today as water levels fall, farmers are drilling deeper and deeper - they are now pumping up water from below 400 metres. Experts predict that the whole area could soon be reduced to a virtual desert. Narsinh Bhai Patel is drilling a new tubewell after his old one ran dry.

Narsinh Bhai Patel - rich farmer
'When a hard year comes the water goes down - it drops about 20 feet a year - so today we've arrived at this level - this is our problem and because of this we have to drill a new tubewell.'

With each new tubewell the crisis looms larger and farmers estimate that they only have five years of water left.

Like thousands of farmers in Gujarat Sandhafi Thanor and his wife keep a few cows. Surplus milk is pooled in a village cooperative. Gujarat's large dairy industry helps support thousands of small farming families, but it is very water intensive.

Considering the amount of water that's needed to grow food for the cows, it takes 1000 litres of water to make just one litre of milk. Falling water levels are widening the gap between rich and poor. Unable to invest in increasing tubewell costs poor farmers like Sandhafi must buy water at high prices from the rich.

Sandhafi Thanor - poor farmer
'The major problem we have, is that of water. We have to go 800-900 ft into the earth for water. We small farmers don't have that capacity. That's why we have to go to big farmers to give us water for the wheat. The big farmers say no you won't get water for wheat. If you want to grow, grow jeeru. It's difficult to grow jeeru.'

In the village of Manund, farmers have formed a co-operative to help them cope with the falling groundwater levels.

Poor farmers in the cooperative are able to buy water at much fairer prices. But they are now facing another problem.

Manund co-op leader
'Up to now we have been able to successfully manage and provide water to all the shareholders, but over time the duration of power supply the electricity board has been providing has really come down drastically from 24 hours to 6 hours per day -25% of our crops have dried out so this is really affecting our functioning, - our arrangements are wasted if we don't get power'.

Electricity is proving to be a decisive factor - Farmers rely on power to pump water to irrigate their crops. But the fact that farmers are subsidised - they only pay a flat rate for power - is criticised as contributing to the groundwater problem.

Dr. Tushaar Shah
'If the energy pricing is set right that will also for the first time produce incentives for the farmers to use water as well as power more efficiently.'

The Manund cooperative are discussing ideas about what might help the situation.

Manund farmer
'If this water level goes down to 1500ft we wont be able to get any water from underground - so in this meeting we are discussing what are the ways to rejuvenate the tubewell systems, whether there is any scope for recharging the ground with rain water. That's what we are discussing in this meeting now.'

Bhavnagar District Southern Gujarat
In the wastelands around Bhavnagar hope has been found in the form of simple checkdams which hold rainwater long enough to let it sink into the ground. In a project run by the NGO Utthan, the government provides funds for materials and the people do the labour themselves.

Check dam in Bhavnagar District, Gujarat, India.

Farmer
'Before these check dams we didn't have any water and because of water scarcity none of us could do any farming so then after these checkdams were constructed and after last years monsoon we found that the wells had filled up and we were able to retain a lot of the lime trees and plants and we have also been able to take a crop of sorghum - as you can see around here only my farm is green and I'm sure that's because my well is full thanks to this checkdam.'

Shots of cricket
Shots of village
Shots of cricket trophies
Shots of water trophys

Many villages around Rajkot are now dependent on government tankers for a water supply. But in the village of Rajsmadhiala they are self sufficient in water and have become champions at cricket. They have also won awards for 23 years of water conservation.

Haradevsinh Jadeja
'I want to make prosperous my village - without having water not a single village can develop - so far I have tried to develop my water table.'

Opening batsman and Village leader Jadeja describes himself as a combination of Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler. Recently he has struck upon an ingenious solution - using the underground cracks from major earthquakes to channel the rain and recharge the groundwater.

Jadeja (demonstrates on the rockface)
'It's clay between the two stones, this is clay and these two stones are connecting with this and the water moves between these two stones.'

Jadeja believes that the solution to the country's water problems lies not in the big dams championed by the government but in cheap small scale irrigation schemes. His initiative as well as other successful cases will be shared with other developing countries through The Third World Water Forum in Kyoto.

Jadeja
'Before recharging we can take only one crop at monsoon - nowadays we can take three crops - so the income of agriculture is not double but three times - three times more.'

Dr. Shah
'So I think as water scarcity becomes acute farmers are under pressure to innovate they tend to adapt and you find that a lot of what the government and the donors and the outsiders are trying to do to help farmers cope with water scarcity overlooks or glosses over such important innovations that farmers develop on their own - what we need to do is rally round farmers identify such innovations and try and replicate and upscale them on a huge scale?'

Antony Turton - AWIRU
'So I think the challenge is to develop a developmental model that does not follow the destructive models of developed economies because because I would argue that the world has not yet developed sustainably anywhere...' (paraphrase)

Ma Tshepo Khumbane
'You cannot talk about poverty when we are hungry - the first step to poverty eradication is food we want food - we say please come and walk the distance with us - we are far from the blue waters, we can not even dream about canals we are going to make our small little dams - with whatever - are you ready to walk that distance with us - please come, come all for the big walk to peace and prosperity for all thank you!'

Credits
Thanks to:
World Water Council / 3rd World Water Forum, International Water Management Institute, Daiko, Professor Tony Allan, Barbara Van Koppen, Nitish Jha, Utthan, Dr. Panjak Kole, Rajen, Malaya Pradhan, Dinesh Kumar, Alan Nicol, Kruger National Park, Jitesh Odedra

Narrated by Sarah Dickins
Music - Mr Dan
Technical Support - Kevin King
Camera/editor - Rob Sullivan
Produced & Directed by Rob Sullivan + Amber Delahooke
Series Editor - Robert Lamb