South Africa: Improvement Will Destroy Philippi’s Farming, Say Activists

MEC Bredell to think about new Environmental Influence Evaluation and public feedback this week for Philippi Horticultural Space

• Members of the Philippi Horticultural Space (PHA) Meals and Farming Marketing campaign imagine the city growth of land in the neighborhood might doubtlessly destroy farming on the land and dry up the Cape Flats Aquifer and meals safety.
• The event initially proposed housing for 15,000 households, faculties, industrial, and industrial amenities, and the remaining land for conservation.
• The Western Cape Excessive Court docket, in 2020, ordered Bredell to rethink the influence of the event and to do correct public participation.
• The PHA Marketing campaign is worried that extra builders will encroach on the farmland as soon as this undertaking is authorized.

The proposed city growth of the 479-hectares of land in Cape City’s Philippi Horticultural Space (PHA) might trigger “irreplaceable lack of vital and fertile agricultural land”. That is in line with members of the PHA Meals and Farming Marketing campaign who imagine that the Oakland Metropolis growth might doubtlessly destroy farming on the land and dry up the Cape Flats Aquifer and meals safety.

The Marketing campaign desires the land for use for agricultural functions.

The event initially proposed housing for 15,000 households, faculties, industrial, and industrial amenities, and the remaining land for conservation.

The Metropolis of Cape City initially utilized to the Division of Agriculture in 2009 to alter a part of the land from “horticultural use” to “city growth”. Nevertheless, the division denied the appliance. The Metropolis then rezoned the world in its 2012 Spatial Development Framework and the event website now falls inside the city fringe of the better PHA.

In February 2020, the Western Cape Excessive Court docket ordered Anton Bredell, MEC for Native Authorities, Environmental Affairs and Improvement Planning, to rethink the Environmental Influence Evaluation (EIA).

The courtroom additionally ordered that correct public participation be executed. Feedback from the general public on the event’s EIA closed on 24 February 2021.

The brand new EIA report is predicted to be submitted to Bredell this week.

Susanna Coleman, PHA Marketing campaign volunteer, stated the choice to provide the event the inexperienced mild a number of years in the past needed to be reconsidered beneath the present local weather circumstances.

“We now know there’s going to be much less rainfall. There are going to be extra excessive local weather occasions,” she stated. Coleman additionally voiced concern that the event may set off extra proposals within the surrounding PHA space.

Nazeer Sonday, PHA marketing campaign chair and small-scale farmer, believes that the event might dry up the aquifer and encroach on meals farming area.

“It’s ludicrous of [the developer] to say that the influence of the event is definitely going to be a very good factor for the Metropolis.” Sonday stated he’s assured that Bredell would make “the fitting choice” when contemplating the EIA and public feedback.

In response to GroundUp’s questions, Bredell’s spokesperson, Wouter Kriel, stated that the minister “will apply his thoughts to all the data earlier than him so as to decide on this matter”.

He stated that ought to the event go forward, it should “end in job creation and can tackle the scarcity of housing alternatives”.

The developer, Oakland Metropolis, didn’t reply to GroundUp.

The Metropolis stated it couldn’t but touch upon the difficulty till it has had a chance to undergo the EIA, which is able to first be thought of by the provincial authorities.