the Karoo Development Conference, Graaf Reinet
26 March 2009
Dean of the Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of the Free State
Professor Crous
Mayor of the Camdeboo Municipality, Mr Japhta
Professor Doreen Atkinson
Trustees of the Karoo Development Foundation
Distinguished guests
It is a great pleasure for me to be here today at this important, and if I
may say so, fascinating conference on the development of the Karoo as a
region.
I was born in the Eastern Cape and spent many happy holidays as a child with
classmates whose families were farmers in this area. It has always held a
fascination for me. While this is true, it is also true that the real
fascination for the Karoo comes when you have been away from it and returns to
rediscover what it looks like and what it feels like to be here.
In September 2007 some of you were present at a workshop held in Sutherland
that I also had the pleasure to attend. Another part of the Karoo,
different and yet linked. On that occasion I recalled some of the passages of
the book by Eve Palmer called âThe Plains of Camdebooâ. She is obviously
one of the daughters of this area, Camdeboo, and I am so glad the municipality
has gone back to that beautiful name. She writes with love and passion of
this place which cannot but inspire the reader to love it too.
She writes:
âLet us remember that the Karoo is one of the worldâs oldest desserts. To the
casual traveller it is an arid desolation, without life and without
charm. To those who know it, it is a land of secret beauty and infinite
variety, sometimes fierce, sometimes hostile, but exercising a fascination that
makes the rest of the world seems tame.â
So some of you might be asking, what a politician with a responsibility in
Foreign Affairs is doing here in the Karoo at this conference even if, as Eve
Palmer says, the rest of the world seems tame in comparison? The answer to
this question would be, that in responding to the needs of the people in South
Africa, the President asked certain ministers and deputy ministers to play the
role of what was called âpoliticalâ champion in areas identified as the poorest
of our country. I was assigned to the Central Karoo District and this how
I met Prof Atkinson and was introduced to her work, and her big and bold
ideas.
But I do believe that there is a relationship between this unique place and
the rest of the world. Indeed modern society is no longer able to confine
itself to one area, one thought, one way of living. The sometimes dreaded
word globalisation is used to describe the way we are today, a sort of catch
all word for the modern world. I prefer the term used by others who refer
to the âdeath of distanceâ. The age of technology has killed off âdistanceâ and
this is both good and bad.
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For Africa and the rest of the developing world, we are faced with huge
survival challenges to secure food for our peoples, to build our economies on
volatile oil and other prices. Fuel is increasingly being linked to food too,
both because the share of energy used in food production and transport has
increased and also because consumers of food and energy have become
competitors. This again will have the most serious effect on the
vulnerable. It is estimated for example that these higher prices and
pressures on food production could push some 100 million people in developing
countries back into poverty. This is cause for great alarm.
In the past few months the world has been doing a lot of soul searching. The
soul searching was occasioned by the crisis that developed first in the
financial markets, spreading rapidly to become a major economic crisis across
the globe. It is an economic crisis which has had its roots of many years in
the way the world works and is not only a crisis of money, but a crisis of
resources. It is a crisis which as usual will plunge the most vulnerable
of the world into a danger zone.
The soul searching has produced a huge debate in the world on what should be
done to change things, and to make the world a better place for future
generations. We in South Africa are convinced that the way to solve
problems is to ensure that all the voices are heard, to work together in the
resolution of the problems in political-speak we talk all the time about the
multi-lateral approach. The soul searchers are talking about this now
too. The G20 (made up of what are regarded as âsystemically significant
economiesâ) used to be a gathering of finance ministers. It has met more
recently at Head of State level for the first time and will meet again next
week in London. Thatâs how serious it is.
The World Bank President is talking about the ânew multilateralismâ, of the
need to âmaximise the strengths of interconnecting actorsâ that this new
multilateralism must âbuild towards a sense of shared responsibility for the
health of the global political economyâ. To quote him, (the President of
the World Bank) Robert Zoellick urges a redefining of economic multilateralism
beyond the traditional focus on finance and trade to think more broadly. He
says âToday energy, climate change and stabilising fragile and post-conflict
states are economic issues.â
Indeed they are. They are part of every international dialogue in the world
today. It is here that we should ask, what can we in South Africa do to
change things? Events that were not of our making have forced us to look at
ourselves anew, to identify the big issues of the day, to consider what our
contribution can be to resolving the problems that the world is confronted by.
Those big issues surely have to include the effects of climate change on us and
on the earth generally; they must also include issues of sustainability in the
broad sense and the development of our people and our country linked to
that.
So back to the Karoo this wondrous part of South Africa. I need not
tell you its vital statistics, occupying as it does a large part of the western
and central parts of our country. Despite its semi-arid nature and sparse
population it encompasses this wide range of natural habitats, including
irreplaceable biodiversity, so evocatively described by Eve Palmer. Taken
together with its extraordinary landscapes and natural resource based
economies, in particular agriculture, tourism and mining, the Karoo is an
integral element of the broader South African economy and society.
In addition, and in ways that are both intangible and spiritual, the Karoo is
an iconic and essential part of what it means to be South African and indeed,
considering its paleontological and archeological heritage, a part of what it
means to be human and to be part of life on earth.
The Karoo, however, together with the rest of the western part of our
country is predicted to experience the impacts of climate change in a
particularly severe way. Indeed, some of these impacts are already
beginning to be felt. And over time, it will be critical that the risks
posed by changing weather patterns and their impacts for human and animal life
and the environment are faced head on.
In particular, climate science shows a drying of the western part of the
country with its attendant effects on the ecosystems and the resource base that
is dependent on water as the fundamental prerequisite for sustainability.
This drying will also threaten further many of the precious, unique and
endangered plants and animals that are found in the Karoo, and may even result
in a shift in landscapes. Recent science has shown that changes in weather
patterns are likely to result in a shifting distribution of desert dune fields
that have been stable for centuries. How do we respond to these threats, and
how does this response build new opportunities?
The first thing to say is that the bottom line of successful adaptation to
potential climate change threats, is to ensure that we understand the potential
risks we face and the extent of our vulnerability and in this regard, and it
would be important to take forward the work done by the Western Cape province
to identify climate risks, to the rest of the Karoo.
Secondly, we need to ensure that our development patterns and the ways that we
carry on our existing economic activities are sustainable. Sustainability
builds resilience, and resilience is the basis of successful
adaptation. So, existing initiatives around sustainable agriculture,
including organic and conservation agriculture, sound water management, the
expansion of our protected areas system in order to build eco system
connectivity, tourism industries built on principles of social, economic
and environmental best practice, all build a base for successful
adaptation.
In particular, sustainable development initiatives that bring together
biodiversity protection, livelihood creation and that seek to ensure that
agriculture, tourism, mining and the natural environment can work together,
have a huge potential in the Karoo. The Succulent Karoo Eco System
Programme is an example of such an initiative and I would like to refer to it
in a bit of detail.
The programme is intended to bring together all spheres of government, land
owners, communities, workers and industry together in a joint endeavour to
protect the fragile succulent Karoo eco-system and at the same time, achieve a
set of social and economic objectives.
In the first five years of the programme close to 400 local short to medium
term jobs were created, more than half of them biodiversity-based jobs in the
tourism sector. In Namaqualand, the Roodebergskloof stewardship initiative
combines conservation of 1220 ha of land with the creation of socioeconomic
opportunities for 14 land reform beneficiaries through nature-based tourism and
improved grazing practices.
A new restoration business established with start-up capital co-financed by
Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) and De Beers is harnessing a local
workforce. Through the programme civil society involvement in biodiversity
conservation in the Succulent Karoo has increased significantly, growing from
fewer than five organisations in 2003 to over fifty today.
The programme has also begun to mainstream biodiversity into industry
practices, including in the mining sector. Examples include the Black Mountain
mine in the Bushmanland Inselberg area, and the restoration practices of mine
dumps in Namaqualand. A newly formed company NM Restoration engages mine
operators by bringing in restoration expertise and scientific field experiments
to develop novel restoration methods. Best practice guidelines for the potato,
rooibos, wine and 4x4 industries have also been developed, and are underway for
the ostrich industry. In the Klein Karoo, guidelines for the game industry have
been developed together with carrying capacity and vegetation condition maps.
All of this lays a strong foundation for an adequate response to climate
change.
So addressing climate change in South Africa will require that we reduce our
contributions of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, as well as preparing to
adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change and its effects on water ,
agriculture, the built environment and the nature and distribution of disease
affecting both humans and animals.
This will mean that over time there must be a decrease in our reliance on
fossil fuels and on coal based power generation, in favour of a shift to
cleaner, less carbon intensive and renewable forms of electricity. The Karooâs
ancient landscape offers a space for a major contribution to the global effort
to reduce greenhouse gases. In particular, the Karoo has a sunshine
resource unparalleled in global terms. In the quest to harness the power
of the sun to generate energy on a large scale, the Karoo is unquestionably the
best location for future initiatives.
In this regard, the Karoo has an important potential to be the heartland of a
new solar industry in South Africa. Given the amount of both sunshine and
of land, the Karoo could be the area in which initiatives such as the
establishment of Concentrated Solar power would be piloted and rolled
out. This new technology is the first in the world to offer the
possibility to both generate solar power at scale, and store it, that would in
time make a major contribution to base load demand. This is beginning to
be discussed as a serious option in South Africa. The Karoo would be the
logical place for such a development to be located and this could pave the way
for a whole new industry to be established that would offer potential not only
for jobs, but for the science economy in this part of the world to be expanded
significantly.
Similarly, researchers looking at the potential for the establishment of carbon
sinks have done initial work that indicates that Spekboom, a plant widely found
in the Karoo may have huge potential to absorb carbon. This work is in its
early stages and should not be overemphasized until much further work is
done. However we should b open to the discoveries of science and the
potential to utilise them to both save the planet and at the same time generate
new economic and job opportunities.
So climate change is a challenge. One which we should meet with a
positive will, creativity, and an approach open to innovation and sound
stewardship. On this basis we may find that into the future, we can
flourish in a different way.
The new world will require us to be creative and innovative. But we are
blessed with resources that few others have. We need to have faith in
ourselves, we need vision and guts.
I would like to end with a quotation from a famous South African. He
was a founding member of the African National Congress and a great scholar and
thinker. As it is election time and I am not allowed to campaign here, I
will let the words of one of our great thinkers do this for me.
The man was Pixley Ka Seme. He was born in 1881. He started school
in a local mission school in KwaZulu-Natal and went on to graduate from
Columbia University in New York and later the first Zulu man to graduate from
Oxford University in England. He wrote of the African Renaissance.
âWhere South Africa appears on the agenda again, let it be because we want
to discuss what its contribution shall be to the making of the new African
Renaissance. Let it be because we want to discuss what materials it will supply
for the rebuilding of the African city of Carthage. Africa cries out for a new
birth, Carthage awaits the restoration of its glory. Tribute is due to the
great thinkers of our continent who have been and are trying to move all of us
to understand the intimate inter-connection between the great issues of our
day, of peace, stability, democracy, human rights, co-operation and
development.
We know as a matter of fact that we have it in ourselves as Africans to
change all of this. We must, in action, assert our will to do so. We
must, in action, say that there is no obstacle big enough to stop us from
bringing about a new African Renaissance.â
I donât think itâs too late to heed Ka Semeâs words.
Thank you
Issued by: Department of Foreign Affairs
26 March 2009
Source: Department of Foreign Affairs (http://www.dfa.gov.za/)
