A paper presented by Dirk Versfeld on 21-23 January 2003, Muldersdrift, South Africa.

South Africa is a water scarce country with a history reflected in deep inequities in the distribution of both land and water. The available water resource has for the most part been allocated to existing users - primarily agriculture, mining, industrial and urban. The country has a good record in providing basic minimum supplies of water to the rural poor and this effort is continuing. Only now is more thought being given to making larger volumes of water available for sustainable livelihoods, making this symposium on water for productive use particularly timely. The available runoff is now almost all utilised or captured and redistributed through dams and canals. There is little opportunity for further exploitation of the resource, and new users are now in competition for the existing available water. Irrigated agriculture is the key user, taking up 56% of the available resource with a contribution of only 4.7% to GDP. This makes it an obvious target for resource redistribution, yet the benefits are shown to be far wider than this primary contribution. It is ironic that the one way of easily redistributing water into the historically disadvantaged sector is through irrigated agriculture, yet this will only worsen the shortages experienced and will do little to resolve the fundamental issue – which is to make water 0really useful to a significantly large proportion of the rural poor. [authors abstract]