Drylands under siege as farming communities fight to protect what cannot be replaced

While mining drives the Northern Cape’s GDP, it often leaves lasting environmental damage.

The harsh sun of Namaqualand was beating down on Christiaan Pool, the seventh generation of his family to farm Biesjesfontein in Namaqualand, located close to the town of Rietpoort and the bigger town of Bitterfontein, as he spoke to Daily Maverick.

“You’ll never get rich farming in Namaqualand. The land will look after you if you look after it. That is the bottom line and how we farm… This is the only way of living that I know,” said Pool.

Pool farms mainly with sheep and some wheat, which is subject to how much rain they get and how early in winter it rains. 

“When the rain comes we determine whether we will sow the wheat or not,” he said.

Pool, like other farmers in Namaqualand, is trying to adapt to newer and more sustainable types of farming.

But their efforts, including transitioning their lands into protected environments and private nature reserves are being stymied by an onslaught of prospecting and mining applications. 

This is on top of renewable energy developments, the illegal harvesting of drylands species, climate change and the arid region already being water scarce.

Pool was one of several farmers Daily Maverick interviewed while in the Drylands last week with the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT) to view projects and the work of its Drylands Conservation Programme.

Read more: South Africa’s Drylands are being transformed through community-led conservation

Read more: SA’s resilient dryland species – from tortoises to toktokkies

Prospecting and mining applications in the Drylands

In speaking to these farmers about the work they were doing to rehabilitate their land from the impacts of various factors mentioned above, a crucial matter that came up was a surge they were seeing in prospecting and mining applications that they believe are threatening their land, water, and way of life. 

They also mentioned the conduct of mining companies during their application processes.

Mari Rossouw is from the Katdooringvlei sheep farm along the West Coast, on the border between the Western and Northern Cape, where they farm with Dorpers, White Dorpers and plant winter crops for grazing. 

A few years ago, Katdoringvlei was targeted in a prospecting application. The applicant was mainly seeking kaolin (a clay mineral used for ceramics, light diffusing material, and more), and planned to drill the entire farm in a one-kilometre grid pattern. 

“All our neighbours have been, or are currently being, affected by prospecting applications. The applicants are applying for an alarmingly long list of minerals and rare earths — diamonds, copper, manganese, various ores, and heavy minerals,” said Rossouw.

She said they all understood that mining was needed for development and provided much-needed employment, but questioned that if all those prospecting around their farm were to be granted mining rights, “it would completely cripple the environment”.

“There are few prospecting applicants in our region who follow the right path. They blatantly ignore legislative regulations regarding how to follow the process, and most of the time do not contact the landowners about their applications,” said Rossouw. 

Currently, Rossouw said,  approximately 77,500 hectares right around Katdoringvlei farm were affected by prospecting. 

“There are landowners who did not even know about these applications until now,” said Rossouw as she referenced the prospecting applications on a map.

JP le  Roux, a biodiversity officer at the Northern Cape’s Department of Agriculture, Environmental Affairs, Rural Development and Land Reform, has been working within the Biodiversity Stewardship Unit on formal declaration of stewardship sites.

Le Roux said the whole Northern Cape was seen almost as the mining capital of South Africa because everything came from there, so the province was rife with mining applications on top of renewable energy applications.

“There’s thousands and thousands of applications,” said Le Roux.

The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy was contacted for comment on the issues raised in this article, but no response has been received yet. 

Pool said they could not deny the right to mine on their properties as only the top part of the soil was under their ownership and all the mineral resources beneath belonged to the state, meaning it could allocate it to whoever qualified for it.

But he said they were trying not to have mining on their land because “it’s destroying everything”.

These farmers had had land destroyed by mining 50 to 100  years ago, and were still unable to rehabilitate it. Pool said that to rehabilitate the land took more than a lifetime.

Pool said their experience as far as mining companies was concerned was that there was not one that did proper land rehabilitation. 

Opaque ownership and communication barriers

A major issue the farmers have is that when companies approach them as landowners, they often get sent technical and legal documents in English, not in their home language of Afrikaans, which often means that they have to hire lawyers to assist and do negotiations on their behalf, or struggle through technical and convoluted English documents.

These applications often list uranium, copper, rare earths, iron, and more for mining and prospecting. There are only a few minerals these companies don’t list in their applications.

In discussing the issues, the Namaqualand farmers found there is often one person listed as an owner for dozens of mining companies. This person is always elusive and difficult to get a hold of.  

For example, there was one person based in Sandton who was discussed, who is the head of 127 companies, but the farmers know nothing about this person and there is nothing available on them.

The area also has poor cellphone reception and sporadic network coverage, which together with the long distances the farmers have to drive to town and the cost of data, made it almost impossible for their entire community to get the prospecting documents. 

“One prospecting applicant even told me I could drive to Cape Town and they would explain to me what was in the document, they were not planning to hold a public meeting,” said Rossouw.

Once an area had been cleared of all vegetation, it took a lifetime to get it back to where it was. If you could get it back. 

“They want to drill 51 boreholes on my property and that needs about 48km of road from one borehole to the other. So if you take it, it’s a 48km and about 2.5m wide road, and you multiply that — it’s quite a huge area and that’s only the road. That’s not the area they’re destroying while drilling,” said Pool.

The farmers all believe that South Africa has good environmental laws to deal with these issues, but the implementation and accountability from mining companies and other stakeholders was not always there. Pool said there was a huge difference between the law and agreements, versus what was happening on the ground.

“If you draw riches from a piece of land, you should at least try to make it (the land) as it was… I’m not against mining, you need (it for) development and jobs… But I think you should limit that to existing mines, we have more than enough existing mines where destruction has already taken place,” said Pool.

Rossouw said that landowners did not always have an opportunity to provide constructive comments regarding prospecting applications. This, she said, was because they usually did not hear from an applicant again after the application had been submitted — except when it was approved.

“We are also not sure that our comments and objections that have been submitted have been taken into account,” she said.

Another topic that came up among the farmers was that applicants used specialists for biodiversity reports from other regions of the country who were unfamiliar with the succulent Karoo. These specialists, Rossouw said, mainly used desktop studies, some of which were old and not appreciative of the real biodiversity in these regions.

It always feels like the prospecting applicants do not value our way of life. As if we are backward and should be only too happy that they come to our rescue with the mines — along with files full of empty promises of tarred roads, shopping malls and even street lights. In a poor community, these promises are shameful.

Rossouw said that mining in Namaqualand did not offer as many job opportunities as the applicants claimed, as they usually mentioned the need for skilled labor and this region had a high unemployment rate in the unskilled segment.

“I would like to see applicants first comply with the regulations on how to proceed before applying for a prospecting application. I would like to see all landowners treated with respect and fully informed of what is planned. I would like landowners to receive documents on time, in a language they are comfortable with and to be kept informed at all times about where they are in the process of the application,” said Rossouw.

Fight against illegal mining and biodiversity threats

Braam and Therese Nieuwoudt are the landowners of Strandontein 559 farm, also known as Waterval farm, in Namaqualand in the Northern Cape, and farm mainly with sheep but also have registered camping sites on the seaside.

Nieuwoudt said their whole farm, 12,259 hectares, was declared a protected environment earlier this year through work between landowners, the Northern Cape’s Department of Agriculture, Environmental Affairs, Rural Development and Land Reform, WWF South Africa and the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

Strandfontein falls on the coastline to the south of the Namaqua National Park, with critical intact coastal ecosystems under severe threat of mining, as described by WWF, the Department of Agriculture, Environmental Affairs, Rural Development and Land Reform and the Endangered Wildlife Trust. They have combined ecotourism, small stock farming and conservation but the threat mining poses to this land continues with illegal mining found on the land. 

Nieuwoudt said they were contacted by the department about three years ago, and this was how their protected environment journey started with many rare and endangered species found on the farm in need of protection, like the golden mole.

“It’s clear skies, you hear nature. It’s a pristine coastline… You can see how other mines disrupt everything but there’s nothing like that on this farm. We must protect it,” said Nieuwoudt, describing the land.

On their land, Nieuwoudt said they had a lot of mining applications, like a current one by Richwill Diamonds.

The Department of Mineral Resources has ordered Richwill Diamonds to reopen their prospecting application on this site for public comment, to prospect for diamonds on the coast of the Strandontein farm and a neighbouring farm, Tities Baai 560, in the Northern Cape. This was after alleged flaws in their public comment process. 

This is the same company the Nieuwoudts filed a case of trespassing against in late 2024 for allegedly prospecting for diamonds on their property without their consent.

“In October 2024 we found Richwill Diamonds on one of our camping sites busy prospecting… We confronted them and saw we couldn’t get anywhere with the conversation, so I made a case of illegal trespassing. We are still waiting for the court case,” Nieuwoudt said.

Richwill Diamonds couldn’t secure the whole property initially, so it went for the coastal section of the property, on which experts and the landowners say there still remains so much biodiversity value and that “there’s just no way we can allow it. So we’re going to fight tooth and nail to try to secure that site.”

At the Strandfontein farm, Le Roux said they found that this was one of the last areas of the Northern Cape coastline they could secure. Initially when they did their homework on the biodiversity value on the site and if there were any mining applications or prospecting taking place, they found no mining applications, mining rights or anything. 

But then as soon as they started working on securing the site, Le Roux said “there was mining application after mining application”. These then get appealed and they go away, but then they come back.

Around Strandfontein alone, Le roux said: “We’ve had applications on the neighbours’ and on this side of the coastline, further up and down the coastline, behind the property… In the last three years, it’s just boomed.”

Impact on water

“Our biggest concern is water. We and the surrounding area have no natural sources of fresh water, except for rainwater and ground dams that fill during the winter months. All boreholes are brackish. This is our only source of water for livestock during dry periods,” said Rossouw.

In all likelihood, she said that mining would negatively affect their underground water sources, which would be “catastrophic” for them.

Loss of habitat is another concern of the farmers. 

“Because we farm in a semi-arid area and use extensive farming methods, we need every available hectare to survive,” said Rossouw.

Namaqualand is a massive expanse with many prospecting applications at the moment, with everyone trying to secure mineral rights in every tiny corner they can. 

Experts, landowners and NGOs involved in this area say they are not against mining and understand it is critical for development and growth, but are hoping to conserve just tiny the sections that are critical.

Zanné Brink, the programme manager of the EWT’s Drylands Conservation Project, said mining had its place but some areas, like coastal dune veld, should be off limits because the ecosystems were irreplaceable once destroyed.

“The coasts are pretty much all mining areas already. And it’s being degraded on a daily basis, even coming inland as well,” she said. This, Brink said, threatened interconnected natural systems, including vital groundwater resources which were increasingly being affected by these applications.

Both communities and ecosystems were interdependent, and losing any part could have cascading negative effects, said Brink. Once these habitats were lost, they could not be restored. DM