WUAs: Diamonds are for ever but not water

Abstract

WATER USERS’ ASSOCIATIONS (WUAs) A group of farmers stood silently on the banks of the Vaal River surveying the few shrinking puddles on the riverbed. The Vaal had never failed them until now. For the first time any one could remember there was no water to irrigate crops or sustain livestock. They knew that without the river the future of their farms, 180 in all, and the agricultural town of Douglas, built on the banks of the Vaal, were at stake. Without crops what was the point of sustaining this community in the arid Northern Cape. Green fields of lucerne, wheat and mealies, growing on the banks of the steady flowing Vaal, its tributary the Riet and the Orange, further south, was all that softened the harsh Karoo landscape as it reached into the Kalahari. Rainfall, in this dry land, was unpredictable. In a good year one could expect 300 mm of rain.

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