South African community lands project

South African policy-makers are working with Murdoch University researchers to tackle issues of environmental degradation, sub-optimum productivity and the constrained economic development of land held in traditional communal tenure.

Murdoch University’s Crop and Plant Research Institute collaborative project, involving experts from the University’s Centre for Rhizobium Studies and Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, has brought together agricultural research bodies in Australia and the Eastern Cape to address the perceived problems in communal lands of the former Ciskei and Transkei.

Murdoch’s Professor John Howieson, expert in legume forages and rhizobium (root-nodule bacteria) research, said the project built on the work of South Africa’s Agriculture Research Council, Eastern Cape Department of Agriculture and the National Woolgrowers’ Association.

“Any proposal to alter management of formerly cultivated lands in the Eastern Cape communities requires careful assessment of their often complicated history of prior ownership, use and current degree of ‘abandonment’,” Professor Howieson said.

The Eastern Cape Communal Arable Lands (ECCAL) project has been working with the local communities since 2006 to introduce legume-based pastures into ‘abandoned arable lands’.

The project aims to improve grazing, and thereby increase livestock production, on abandoned arable lands that were underused and at severe risk of erosion.

Mr John Davis, Lecturer at Murdoch’s Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy said a key component of the research was the active participation from the communities.

The project is co-funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, and as a spin-off for Australia, the research has uncovered under-used perennial forage legumes which may help low-rainfall regions of southern Australia adapt to climate change.