Achmad Binkhuis’s father was not allowed to buy his own farm under Apartheid rules. After the fall of the regime, Binkhuis turned two chickens into 35,000 and now runs a poultry and vegetable vendor, Chamomile Farm. Now, proposed rezoning threatens his land.
“Before, it was based on the colour of your skin. Now it’s economic,” Binkhuis said.
Chamomile Farm is situated in the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) in the heart of Cape Flats, about 20km from Cape Town. Almost five million people live in the Cape Flats, often in densely populated townships plagued by gang violence and unemployment.
It is home to all of the workers at Binkhuis’s farm, where they are provided food, a salary and a safe place for their kids while they work.
“Chamomile means to be strong under adversity,” Binkhuis said, while the young son of a worker plays with an injured bird.
“I always tell my boys not to grow faster than the community you reside in. You must grow with the community.”
The PHA is the most productive region for horticulture on a per-hectare basis in South Africa.
Developers are now trying to rezone what is left of the 3,000-hectare PHA agricultural zone to build houses and mining facilities. But the PHA sits on top of an aquifer, a unique reservoir of underground water conserved by rock formations and sand. Building or mining could destroy the aquifer, which provides fertile land for farmers to grow more than half of Cape Town’s fresh produce.
Grassroots battle
A few minutes' drive down the road, Nazeer Sonday runs a small sustainable farm on one hectare of land. He has banned together with other farmers to form the PHA Food & Farming Campaign, which teaches locals from the townships how to farm and fights against rezoning.
“This area is so important for climate resilience,” Sonday said. “For water and local food production.”
The aquifer allows the PHA to resist against droughts, which have been intensifying in Southern Africa due to climate change.
The 2015-2020 Cape Town water crisis saw Western Cape province implement drastic water restrictions due to drought, with residents forced to halve their consumption. In 2017, Cape Town narrowly avoided “Day Zero”, which would have made it the first major city in the world to run out of water in the municipal supply.
But mobilising to fight against developers is a difficult prospect for the PHA Food & Farming Campaign. Sonday said “landless farmers” do not have a lot of resources and their day-to-day life is “taking care of tomorrow's food”.
Susanna Coleman, a Cape Town optometrist, has been involved in the fight for the last 15 years. She said there are different ways to assess the true value of the land.
“One is, How much can I sell it for? The other is, What can I get from the land?”
Coleman said some farmers sell land zoned for agriculture for “triple its value” to developers who hope to rezone it.
“All of a sudden it becomes an irreversible project," said Coleman, explaining that land that was used to grow food for the city for the last 150 years is now being repurposed.
The PHA Food & Farming Campaign has successfully stopped four developments in the PHA, Coleman said. But there are still some ongoing applications, including a 25,000-unit residential development and an open-cast silica sand mining proposal.
Capitalising on the land
Coleman said the city of Cape Town favours the redevelopment of agricultural zones simply to make more money.
“It’s to make more levy-paying occupants for the city,” she said. “It’s worth much more to them as a piece of land that gives them 25,000 levy-paying houses per month than a piece of open land that feeds half a million people.”
Cape Town's Deputy Mayor Eddie Matthews said that “every development management application is considered on merit”.
“Some development proposals also require other authorisations to be granted in terms of other legislation," he told FRANCE 24. "Therefore, the city of Cape Town might not be the only decision-making authority, depending on the development proposal submitted for consideration.”
He added that residents have the right to object to any proposed redevelopments.
“Applications are advertised to provide the public and interested and affected parties the opportunity to comment, and if there are objections, the application [goes] before the Municipal Planning Tribunal for decision,” he said.
Cape Town is also experiencing a housing crisis, with more than 600,000 on the waiting list for affordable homes. The city of Cape Town has tried to address this, including with a project in Manenberg in the Cape Flats where 42 families who qualified received free title deeds.
But building on top of an aquifer is a complex and expensive process. It requires a geotechnical assessment, specific pile foundations and waterproofing, making it impossible to build affordable housing in the PHA, according to Coleman.
“You can’t do that in the PHA, simply because the water table is too high,” she said. “You can’t put low-cost housing here.”
Due to the expense, houses built on rezoned agricultural land in the PHA would be sold for higher prices – and are thus unlikely to serve those on the waiting list for low-cost homes.
English (US) · 