With this statement of fact, included in a report that detailed the likely impact of a proposed citrus farm on the Klaserie River basin, the ecologist Jessica Wilmot was echoing the work of Rachel Carson.
Published in 1962, Carson’s Silent Spring was an investigative masterpiece; an exposé of the catastrophe in the world of beetles and bugs, where pesticides were disrupting the food chain and silencing all birdsong. Back then, the public had no idea of the damage caused by habitat conversion and monocultural farming practices — almost 60 years later, thanks to the role played by Silent Spring in igniting the environmental movement, we know that pesticides are directly implicated in our current insect apocalypse.
Of course, to every type of global ecological crisis there is a profusion of local contexts. On the Klaserie River, as Wilmot pointed out in her report, that context had everything to do with where the citrus farm had been staked out.
“The property occurs in an area where the main land use is either wildlife-based tourism or wildlife economy initiatives,” she wrote, before noting that it was sandwiched between two of the largest private game parks in the country — the 60,000-hectare Klaserie Reserve and the 53,000-hectare Timbavati Reserve.
Wilmot, who published her report in April 2019 on behalf of the NGO Elephants Alive, came to the fight when she realised that the elephants on these two reserves would almost certainly sniff out the orange orchards, which would result in “human-wildlife conflict” and the possible slaughter of the animals.
The Kruger National Park and the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region, in a response to the mooted project published five months earlier, had likewise foreseen the problem.
“The current fencing system ‘keeping animals in’ is very porous,” these conservation heavyweights had noted, “due to the fact that the Klaserie River itself cannot be fully fenced, meaning movement levels from the reserve to the proposed citrus area could be high.”
There were a number of reasons for their interest. First, as they had stressed, the proposed development was located inside the Kruger National Park Land Use Buffer, which had been “earmarked for expansion”.
In anticipation of the proclamation of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity of January 2020 — an international gathering that would call for a third of the surface of the earth to be “under protection” by 2030 — the response had explained that the property was slap-bang in the middle of the Greater Kruger Open System in South Africa — a vast wildlife corridor that (all things being equal) would eventually connect to the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, as run trilaterally by
South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Second, there was the fact that the Klaserie River flows into the Olifants River, one of the Kruger Park’s largest watercourses. Here, given the use of pesticides and herbicides that commercial citrus farming typically entails, the response had been pretty blunt:
“Vast amounts are being invested in the clearing of the Klaserie headwaters of invasive alien plants so as to improve streamflow. This additional water is not for uptake by a single entity, but is intended to maintain basic human needs and river health to the confluence. Downstream impacts on the protected areas are likely and there is little evidence of mitigation.”
The mitigation plans, as both Elephants Alive and the Kruger Park made clear, should ideally have been included in the draft environmental impact assessment, completed in 2018. As it turned out, the final EIA, submitted in June 2019, would acknowledge the likelihood that water use for irrigation of the citrus orchard would have a “negative impact on available water resources in the region”.
So how, then, did the citrus farmer get his environmental authorisation?
This question, among many others, would form the basis of ongoing litigation between the citrus farming company, identified in court papers as Casketts Sitrus (Pty) Ltd — a cosmetic name-change from Soleil Mashishimale (Pty) Ltd, a subsidiary of the Soleil Sitrus Group, which exports to markets in Europe, Japan, the Middle East and Russia — and the Klaserie Reserve, the Timbavati Reserve and Elephants Alive.
As the leading conservationists in the fight, these three applicants would lean on the tenets of the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA) to take Soleil’s environmental authorisation on review, a process — still pending at the time of this writing — that would involve hauling the Limpopo provincial authorities before the Polokwane High Court. But, given what they say is Soleil’s alleged manipulation of the provincial authorities’ ineptitude, they would also seek an urgent interdict to halt the farming conglomerate in its tracks.
Backing up the applicants, as “interested and affected parties” in a concurrent appeal process, would be no less than 12 of the biggest brands in South African conservation, including SANParks and the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, with the Global White Lion Protection Trust offering support from the sidelines.
