South
Africa: Differentiated impacts of tree plantations on women
The history of the plantation industry
in South Africa can be compared with the development of plantations
elsewhere in the South: in Brazil, Aracruz Cellulose was developed
under a military dictatorship; Indonesia’s pulp boom was planned
and put into operation during the Suharto regime; Cambodia, Thailand
and Chile provide other examples of how state oppression has benefitted
pulp/plantations companies.
In South Africa, the initial phase affected
state-controlled land, from where communities were removed and
relocated to other tribal areas by government decree. The 1980s
witnessed a wave of new plantations led by timber companies with
Sappi and Mondi taking the lead. This development took place mainly
on land previously owned by white farmers. Thanks to artificially
low input costs, especially wages and land acquisition, as well
as generous subsidisation by the government at that time, the
local timber industry has grown into a major exporter of wood
and wood derived products.
However, the lives and standards of
living of local communities have not been improved by the plantation
industry. The so-called empowerment deals and contracting opportunities
to the communities were not widely distributed, thus becoming
a source of differentiation and social division. Furthermore,
the encroachment of industrial timber plantations has led to environmental
impacts --including the irreversible destruction of grasslands,
reduction in streamflow and water quality--, which in typical
rural community life is difficult to separate from social, cultural,
economic and political issues.
Further down this adverse scenario women
suffer the differentiated impacts of various activities in the
industrial timber plantations sector affecting them. A number
of factors result in greater pressure on women from timber plantations.
These factors should be read in the context of the culturally
and historically defined division of labour among women and men
in a patriarchal society, complicated by colonial economic policies.
Rural family life is patriarchal and the status of the male head
is unchallenged. It is usually the male head who will make the
important decisions in the family. The role of women in these
economies is complicated by the lack of mainstreaming of female
involvement and participation in broader issues. They are largely
considered as reproductive rather than productive.
Women are affected by the timber industry
through involvement as workers, as growers, or because they reside
close to or inside plantations. Those that work are affected by
differential wages or the ability (or lack of it) to access skilled
or better paying jobs. Timber growers are affected by their ability
to command access to adequate land to ensure profitability, as
well as retaining or independently deciding how to use the proceeds
from the sale of the wood. Theoretically, and very often in practice,
tree growing offers an economic option to rural women who have
no other opportunity, provided they have access to some suitable
land. However, many woodlots are contractually owned by men, but
actually worked by women. Depending on how the contractual arrangements
work out, the labour aspects have the potential to boost men’s
cash income although women do the work. This money seldom benefits
the women and children who did the work as men often consider
them already paid by virtue of staying in their homestead.
Problems related to living near or inside
plantations have to do with safety. Plantations close to people’s
homes have increased safety and security concerns; women get raped
and thieves dump their loot in the plantations: “As parents with
girl children we worry a lot about the plantations. There are
always strange men wandering around aimlessly and many sexual
offenses have been reported. So they [girl children] cannot go
to fetch water or firewood anymore. Besides, the plantations are
used by thieves and robbers to hide and to store their loot. When
the police discover these things they come and harass us by searching
our houses apartheid style. We are not safe here with these plantations”,
said a local woman.
Women’s time is shared amongst a multiplicity
of activities, for which production responsibilities (food, the
availability of water and energy for home use) compete with the
reproduction responsibilities (childbirth, caring for and raising
children). The advent of industrial timber planting activities
in these rural communities complicates the nutrition and caring
role of women. “From a woman’s point of view my biggest problem
is that of food. We were not used to buying food from the shops
because where we come from we had fields for beans and mealies.
There would even be fields for the following year’s crops. You
would rotate the fields comfortably because there was enough land.
We would buy machines and grind our own corn. We would never buy
mealie meal. These are some of the things that remind us of where
we are coming from.”
The timber industry has been fairly
labeled as the ‘chief water thief’. The question of water and
timber plantations is a very important one in a country like South
Africa, where water is scarce and also very important for rural
communities which were allocated land in the areas they were because
the land was not good enough for European agriculture and settlement.
In KwaZulu-Natal province, thirsty timber plantations are often
situated high up in the water catchments, short-changing downstream
water users. In rural community areas the loss of surface water
has severely negative implications for people’s ability to survive.
Plantations cause small springs, streams and ponds to disappear,
and this forces people to move into ecologically sensitive marginal
areas to find water for their livestock and vegetable gardening.
Also, when water becomes scarce it is women who have to walk longer
distances to fetch water. It is women who have to wake up much
earlier to get water for the household.
A senior woman
in Sabokwe, Mrs Ziqubu, argued: “The thing is that we compete
for water with these plantations. They use up a lot of water.
I remember when we got here in 1996, the
stream close to our garden was running perennially because the
eucalyptus trees were not here. This piece of land from here to
the road up there was grassland. The company feared that we would
plant our crops and build our houses on that land so they quickly
planted it to trees. Since then, water has become scarcer. The
stream is drying up. The land, which we had to drain because it
was swampy, has become very dry. We used to dig very small wells
to water the reclaimed land. Now we have to dig deeper and we
get the water from far away. Water for drinking has also equally
become scarce. We also have to fetch water for our cattle, chickens
and goats, besides the water for domestic consumption. This makes
the work for women even harder. We have a co-operative garden
run by women from this community which we fenced with assistance
from the Department of Agriculture, yet we face big problems with
watering it. We fetch water in buckets on our heads – and the
women’s garden project involves very old women. This is not a
way to live and do business. The problem of water is as crucial
as the access to land itself. You may get land, but without water
there is very little one can do with the land. So we are here
in the middle of a desert created by the plantation industry.
To think that they do not even assist with drilling of boreholes,
construction of windmills or other such water technology. This
is why I said earlier that we are left to pay for the costs of
these unconsidered impacts of the industry.”
Excerpted and adapted from: A Study
of the Social and Economic Impacts of Industrial Tree Plantations
in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa, John Blessing Karumbidza,
WRM, December 2005
http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/SouthAfrica/book.pdf
