June 30, 1990

Apartheid is usually viewed as a political system which oppresses people. But it does more than that. It also oppresses the environment. Few countries have experienced more environmental degradation than South Africa in the 40-some years of apartheid there.

Alan B. Durning in Worldwatch Paper 95, "Apartheid's Environmental Toll," writes, "Institutional racism has been as devastating for South Africa's environment as for its people. Apartheid has polluted the air and water, pillaged the bedrock, and torn the earth away like flesh. In much of the country, the soil indeed cannot keep the people anymore."

Government legislation had divided South Africa into scattered homelands or native reserves. Eighty-seven percent of the land was reserved for whites while only 13 percent was allotted to the far more numerous blacks. The overpopulation of some of the black homelands is behind much of the environmental damage in South Africa.

Durning says, "Poor land, crowding, shortage of labor and dire poverty, all flowing from apartheid, have been disastrous for these regions" (homelands).

One U.S. Agency for International Development official working in neighboring Swaziland is quoted as saying, "Many of the homelands bear more resemblance to the face of the moon than to the farms and game reserves that cover the rest of the country."

The already inferior land given to the blacks in homelands is, after 40 years, badly degraded. One study of the Ciskei homeland reported already 10 years ago that "46 percent of the land there was moderately or severely eroded and 39 percent of its pastures overgrazed."

The plight of the forests in the homelands has long been hopeless. Two-thirds of South Africans use wood for fuel. With the vast overpopulation, many forests have been decimated. A study done by the Energy Research Institute of the University of Capetown concluded that four of the 10 reserves were already in fuelwood deficit in 1980, consuming more wood each year than their land produced.

Environmental deterioration in the homelands has four major causes: Poor land, politically enforced overpopulation, labor shortage and poverty. First, the 10 homelands are located in fragile environments best suited as rangeland. From the beginning, blacks were allotted land where topsoil was thin, rainfall scarce and the ground sloping and rocky.

Second, apartheid forces the land to support too many people. The land's "carrying capacity" has been reached and exceeded many times over. During World War I, a government commission surveyed the agricultural carrying capacity of the small reserve of Qua Qua. They estimated that the area was already overcrowded with 5,000 inhabitants. Today that reserve has 500,000 people. The homeland Ciskei has about nine times as many people as it can support in subsistence agriculture. Birth rates in the homelands are higher than anywhere else in the country. Apartheid denies the people there access to education, health care, family planning and secure sources of livelihood -- the things that make smaller families more desirable. South Africa's black population has quadrupled during this century.

Third, the homelands suffer a labor shortage. Workers in their peak productive years leave to work in the mines and elsewhere as cheap labor for the whites. The homelands then are left mostly to children, the elderly and the infirm.

Fourth, poverty itself makes land conservation difficult. A study done by two researchers 10 years ago ranked 57 nations for which income distribution data were available South Africa came in last and it proabaly remains the most inequitable nation on earth. Latest information says 95 percent of blacks earn less that $100 a month.

There are other factors in South Africa's environmental problems which are more indirectly related to the apartheid system. Mining is a big source of wealth for the affluent minority. There are more than 1,000 mines and quarries, using the cheap labor of the homelands and scarring the landscape. South Africa is the world's leading producer of gold, chromite and platinum, second in manganese, third in uranium and ninth in coal.

Durning lists three ways apartheid is linked to environmental degradation caused by mining. First, enormous costs incurred by the white government and economy have made Pretoria financially dependent on mining. Second, as is usually the case, the environmental costs of mining are born by the poor who, in South Africa, are almost exclusively black. Third, the political powerlessness of South African blacks has left them unable to counter the industry's irresponsibility. For example, note these factors:

• Most mines and hazardous dumps are located in or near the homelands.

• Since the start of this century, 46,000 workers have died underground.

• Data on coal mining shows that from 1978 to 1983 South African coal miners were about ten times more likely to die on the job than their counterparts in the United Kingdom. The Africans earn about one-tenth as much as the U.K. miners for their hazardous work.

• In 1986 a fire swept though the Kinross Gold Mine killing 176 miners and causing injuries to many others.

South Africa is much too dependent on its coal as an energy source. Because of sanctions and the lack of oil in South Africa, the country derives 85 percent of its energy from coal. The environmental consequences of burning coal are well-known. On a per capita basis, white South Africans are the world's worst "greenhouse" offenders. Carbon emissions per capita for this group are 9.3 tons, almost twice that of the United States.

Finally, the little wars caused by South Africa trying to destabilize the rebels in neighboring countries have taken an environmental toll on wildlife, especially elephants. Hardwood forests are being cut down to sell and buy weapons for the rebels in some of the countries.

Thus apartheid has not only oppressed the people of South Africa, but also contributed greatly to the environmental deterioration occuring there.

There are some hopeful signs that positive changes are about to take place in the South African apartheid system. Hopefully these changes will bring more justice to the people and reverse the continuing environmental degradation.