In the flush of optimism which followed the 1994 elections – and certainly well into the new millennium – I was actively engaged in trying to expunge the legacy of Apartheid and isolation from the wine industry. It was obviously an extended enterprise, occupying much of my working day. It involved engaging in the transformation of the KWV, the creation of the Wine Industry Trust, the establishment of bursary funds to train winemakers, setting up events aimed at benchmarking Cape wines to international standards and any number of incidental functions and roadshows in-between.

Inevitably this involved my studying – in order to understand it better – the wider agricultural environment in which the wine industry operated. There were obviously questions which needed to be addressed in the context of grape-growing: was wine the correct agricultural product for the Western Cape? Was the industry optimising its income potential? How could vineyard workers ever take ownership of their workplace if it remained highly capital intensive? What was required to make agriculture a viable alternative to urbanisation?

Unsurprisingly there were no easy answers. There aren’t a whole lot of crops which could easily replace grapes. In fact, many of the wine farms which also produced and exported fruit have given up, abandoning their orchards in favour of berries (if they have the capital it takes to establish the growing tunnels) or simply giving the land back to nature as part of the industry’s bio-diversity initiative.

Land re-distribution remains a driving imperative on the political agendas of many of the parties, notwithstanding the enormous difficulties facing the agricultural sector. It is fraught with contradictions: many of the people to whom the concept has appeal have very little idea about how to make a living from the land. The record of the farming projects which have proceeded out of the re-distribution schemes is uninspiring to say the least. Even a gambler with an appetite for long odds and high risks would think twice before backing the return-to-the-land fantasies of our increasingly urbanised population.

Here is where Myanmar offered a paradigm which at least re-kindled the spirit of optimism which had characterised my unlikely stint in the agricultural sector. It is not a rich country, and its “troubles” (as the Irish might have put it) over the better part of the last 80 years has not seen it develop the kind of infrastructure which would enable it to compete in the “tiger” environment of south-eastern Asia. In many respects it functions as a subsistence environment. But here’s the thing: in the time that I was there I never saw anyone who looked like he was starving, nor were there beggars on street corners and along the pavements. I did see people who were clearly living alongside the metro-rail tracks, and many of the homes were no better than the shacks in our more visible squatter camps. Incidentally, I also never saw anyone who was fat – at least not in the way that our officials, policemen, politicians and speed trap operators are (but then that’s the price you pay for a sedentary lifestyle).

The markets were full of fresh produce, the villages were surrounded by fields which were teaming with growers, the hydroponic gardens on Lake Inle were being worked constantly. There was food everywhere, and in a country with one of the lowest (in hard currency) per capita incomes in the world, vegetables are clearly affordable because they’re produced cheaply enough. In fact Myanmar is about as schizophrenic – in the currency sense – as South Africa used to be in the days of the financial Rand. A portion of the population lives and earns in dollars (which is pretty much the main currency for tourism transactions); the rest make do with kyats (pronounced ‘chats’) which have great buying power at a subsistence level. A trip on the circular train (which serves as a ring road for the population of Yangon) costs 100 of them – which is only R1,00.

Not all of the agriculture is done with manual labour, though I never came across any large scale commercial farming. I did see many small and very useful – though quite primitive – tractors, designed to fulfill a number of functions (including transporting people and produce into the villages). None of this seems to have required a great deal of capital. People just get on with what they have – they don’t wait until they begin life with Mercs and major investors.

Visitors to the Cape doing the conventional tourist wine route are likely to imagine that the business is necessarily a capital intensive enterprise – and mostly it is. If you want to build a 300 tonne (20000 case) winery to process a mix of red and white grapes you won’t see much change from R35m, and that’s leaving off the bells-and-whistles that aren’t just a matter of the proprietor’s ego but could actually contribute to wine quality in a tricky vintage.

Not everyone has this kind of money, of course, and some manage by buying up second hand equipment, or focusing on red wine which is less dependent on chilling capacity and stainless steel tanks. Then there are the artisanal amateurs, the so-called garagistes, who sometimes produce exceptional wines from the most primitive set-ups often installed in their garages.

Lately they’ve become a threatened species – as legislation initiated by the DA-led Western Cape government has strangled their activities in a tangle of red tape. A combination of restrictive liquor laws and the imposition of business licensing regulations has made it impossible for many to continue pursuing their hobby from home. At one level you cannot entirely blame the authorities: they have a duty of care to neighbours in a suburban environment, and even small scale wine-making does involve some noise and mess.

The question however is only partly one of where to draw the line. The Garagiste movement set as the maximum permissible size of operation 40 barrels, in other words, 1,000 cases, the processing capacity of a double garage. In its prime (that is, before the legislation decimated its numbers), it totalled 70 members of whom around 25 were actively making wine. Now it has around 10 producers, mostly because it has become impossible for them to function (they are not even allowed to set up a cooperative working cellar), though also, it must be said, because some have moved onto larger scale operations.

We all talk about how the economy (and employment) will only grow if we develop small and medium size enterprises, and then we make it impossible for them to get going, let alone flourish. We don’t encourage entrepreneurship, though we pay lip-service to the idea. We accord recognition to inventiveness, to the power of the human spirit to devise solutions in the face of adversity – and then we raise the bar to make sure that the impediments are always greater than the momentum to advance. Perhaps we need not so much to study the example of Myanmar but to experience it – from the complete destruction of infrastructure and the return to a subsistence way of life – just to realise that the price of stifling creativity is nothing less than the survival of our society as we know it. DM