International Herald Tribune
08-21-2004
The corn on Casparus Joubert's farm is as high as an elephant's eye or would be, were any elephants around. There aren't yet. But it is not out of the realm of possibility. ''We'll start out with reedbuck, zebras, all the small antelope,'' said Joubert, a big, blond man with a booming voice, during a recent chat in his farm office. ''Later we'll put in rhino and giraffe, because they need an additional game fence. And the third phase will be to put in predators.'' And to get rid of the corn. Joubert and his brother Thys control more than 4,800 hectares, or 12,000 acres, in KwaZulu-Natal Province, acquired piece by piece over the last decade, some of the finest farmland in South Africa. These days, however, the richest harvest here is not corn but foreigners who thirst for the African wildlife experience and do not mind paying to get it. So the Jouberts plan to give up on farming altogether and stake their savings to transform their stand into an upscale game reserve. ''We'll have to build chalets and supply exactly the same thing as you get in Kruger National Park tourism, restaurants, bars, all that thing,'' Joubert said. ''The women have a plan to make it exclusive.'' The Jouberts are part of what seems an unstoppable trend, spurred by South Africa's emergence from apartheid into an acceptable, even desirable stop for wealthy tourists. Already, there is a farm-turned-game-preserve just across the main highway from Cas Joubert's land and another a few kilometers away. In all, there are at least 140 private preserves in KwaZulu-Natal, covering about 2,600 square kilometers, or 1,000 square miles of mostly converted farmland. And more farms are going wild every year. ''It's happening all over the country,'' said Jeff Gaisford, the spokesman for Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife, the provincial parks and travel department. ''A growing number of people are dumping cattle ranching, particularly in Zululand, because every type of bug and tropical disease that affects cattle exists in Zululand.'' In a game preserve, by comparison, ''you just put the animals on your property and let them get on with it,'' he said. ''You don't have to have a vet around every week. You don't have to check them for tick loads. They're acclimatized to the environment.'' On its face, this trend is a winner for South Africa, an arid land largely ill-suited to industrial agriculture. Large-scale commercial farming is increasingly untenable in South Africa anyway, Joubert contends, given the fat subsidies for competing European and American growers and the wild swings of South Africa's currency, the rand. With the rand as strong now as at any time in the last decade, he said, a ton of imported American corn can be bought for 800 rand, or about $125. It costs Joubert $180 to grow that amount. By comparison, the most sumptuous private lodges along the border of Kruger National Park, in northeastern South Africa, offer Jacuzzis, in-room Internet, exercise rooms, pedicures, designer decor and sophisticated cuisine and rent for more than $1,000 a night. Per person. And there can be waiting lists. There is an ecological upside as well. Lion, antelope and, yes, elephants roamed this area freely until the turn of the last century. Bringing them back, and at a profit, would seem to be a conservationist's dream. ''The tourism market is opening up after '94 and the democratic elections,'' Joubert said. ''You can go and advertise abroad and get people in. It's becoming quite a safe destination.'' There is one cloud on this rosy horizon, and it is a big one: Turning farms into game preserves means moving farm laborers to make way for antelope, rhino and lions. Post-apartheid South Africa has been beset by poisonous disputes between white farmers and black tenants who have staked claims to the land. A government program aimed at enfranchising landless blacks, farm laborers say, is so far a bundle of empty promises. Many farm workers simply resist moving off land that their families have occupied for generations, and on which their ancestors are buried. About 25 kilometers from Ngogo, a sprawling shantytown of stick-and-mud hovels holds thousands of blacks evicted from local farms in the last decade. Some experts suggest that farmers have set up game preserves expressly to force contentious black tenants off their farms. The Jouberts' spread illustrates the problem. When the transition to game preserve begins in two or three years, about 520 black laborers and their families will have to leave, and their jobs will largely vanish. Tourist sites need workers, though, and Joubert said his preserve would generate jobs paying as much as or better than farm labor. Gaisford, of the parks agency, says one cattle rancher who employed a dozen laborers wound up employing 100 workers after switching to a game ranch. To ease the transition, Joubert says, he has offered tenants space on a nearly 450-hectare farm or a cash settlement to move elsewhere. But the moves are seldom pleasant for either side, and those tenants who accept a settlement and move are sometimes filled with remorse. ''Nobody's working, and only one woman is earning a pension from the government,'' said Jonas Shabalala, 62, who took a $1,500 payment from the Jouberts and moved his family of 12 to a barren mud hut beside a nearby railroad track. Shabalala now has no land to grow crops or raise cattle. ''We are all depending on that one woman to live,'' he said.
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