Agent Orange — cross-boundary cooperation is key to reversing the ‘tragedy of the commons' in grasslands

Daily Maverick

11-05-2025

Lives depend on keeping SA's old-growth grasslands healthy. They feed our herds, they're water factories and they mop up carbon pollution, which stabilises the climate. Protecting them from overuse, invasive trees and increasingly volatile weather extremes calls for collaborations that straddle national borders, private fence lines and the boundaries of overburdened commonages.
The foothills of southwestern Lesotho are like a burn victim who has barely survived their injuries. As if they've been doused with napalm, the once-plump, glowing skin of soil and grass is reduced to scar tissue, drum-tight over the jutting sandstone bones beneath. The wound is trying to heal, but the erosion gullies are keloid scars that can't mend.
This is a full-body wound, stretching as far as the eye can see, and the South African side of the Tele Bridge border crossing near Sterkspruit in the Eastern Cape isn't in better shape.
The Agent Orange that has stripped both sides of the border to the bone is a toxic mix of over a century of exclusionary land ownership laws — think: 1913 Land Act and apartheid-era Bantustans — followed by decades of changing economic forces that have reshaped how farmers manage their wealth, livelihoods and livestock.
The Lesotho lowlands and the Eastern Cape highlands might fall on two sides of a border created by the recent notion of the nation-state, but grasslands don't care for administrative divides between neighbouring states or neighbourly farmers. Efforts to repair damaged grasslands need to straddle fences and think big, ecologists and conservationists agree.
The custodians of these grasslands in Lesotho and South Africa — indigenous communal stockmen and commercial farmers alike — can't return to a time when the national border didn't exist, or when there were fewer mouths to feed off of a seemingly boundless prairie. Their herds can't roam as they once did, with relative freedom across unfenced and un-owned grazing.
A new model of shared custodianship is emerging here, though, which draws working farmlands into the conservation fold, and may swing the compass towards a better way to protect and even restore these life-giving prairies. Lives will depend on it working, as pressure continues on this overstretched ecosystem in an increasingly volatile climate.
Straddling fences, crossing divides
'Farmers are farming grass and water, not sheep,' says Thembanani Nsibande, grasslands programme manager with the conservation non-profit WWF. He's speaking of the landowners in the Eastern Cape highlands who have agreed to be part of an embryonic grasslands national park that's aimed at getting agriculturally productive farmlands into a semiformal protected area agreement that should boost farming outputs, preserve biodiversity, repair these mountainous 'water factories' and mop carbon pollution from the atmosphere.
It's been a decade-long journey, but the declaration of the park — roughly 30,000 hectares in size and likely to be called the North Eastern Cape Grasslands National Park — is imminent, according to conservation management authority SANParks, which is working with the WWF to pull the initiative together.
Sheep and cattle depend on the grasslands for food, says Nsibande. The quality and quantity of grazing depends on the particular alchemy of healthy grasses, living soils and ample water. First and foremost, farmers are custodians of that natural magic — what happens beneath the hoof is as important as what happens above it.
Only 2.2% of the country's grasslands are protected, most of the rest is in the hands of private landowners or in a communal arrangement and 60% is irreversibly changed, according to the Endangered Wildlife Trust. Rescuing this embattled ecosystem needs an approach that moves beyond the old 'fortress' style of conservation.
'We can't continue with the old way of establishing protected areas and implementing conservation, where we put fences up and chase people out,' he says, explaining the structure of the park, which is a voluntary land stewardship arrangement.
' [Farmers] continue to own the land and manage their properties, but do it with the different stakeholders to ensure it's done in a sustainable manner,' Nsibande explains.
SANParks has identified an area of grasslands across the region that needs collaborative conservation across extensive landscapes, not small or fragmented patchwork interventions. Almost half of this area falls under communal landownership; most of the rest is privately owned. Both forms of ownership have unique challenges in terms of farming sustainably and being part of a conservation initiative — issues which facilitators at SANParks and WWF are negotiating slowly.
The quid pro quo is that farmers get the kind of support once offered by state extension officers, such as advice on veld-friendly agro-ecology methods: going chemical-free and returning to age-old rotational grazing that allows veld recovery. They'll also get funding to clear invasive plants, and help with wetland restoration and erosion control.
Communal farming families with limited water access will benefit from help with natural spring protection.
'These [grasslands] are a water factory, but our people who live in those mountains don't have access to water, so we do natural spring protection to allow them access to clean water,' Nsibande concludes. DM
This is part of the Golden Threads series for the Story Ark – tales from southern Africa's climate tipping points project, which investigates the state of the country's old-growth grasslands, the free natural services they offer, and what South Africa needs to do to conserve and repair them.
The series is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, which supports investigative journalism.