SA drought budget cut substantially

Eight of SA’s nine provinces have been declared drought disaster areas - but the budget to address the crisis is substantially less than in 2015.

Johannesburg - Eight of the nine provinces have been declared drought disaster areas, but it has now emerged that the budget to address the crisis is substantially less than last year.

This was to help fund the national budget cuts needed to keep South Africa afloat in tough times.

But even the drought money that was available last year wasn’t fully used.

Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Des van Rooyen announced last week that all provinces, except Gauteng, had been declared states of disaster over the past 18 months.

He was speaking at a meeting of the inter-ministerial task team on drought.

But a look at the numbers reveals that money allocated to the Department of Agriculture alone for 2016/17 was barely a third of what was in the budget last year.

Documents provided by the department said a little over R450 million was allocated for drought relief in 2015/16, comprising almost R194m of money allocated to each province as part of their equitable share allocation.

The rest was from the department’s Comprehensive Agricultural Support Programme (Casp).

The National Treasury said the Department of Agriculture had used only R318m of this money by February, the end of the financial year.

The department’s 2016/17 drought relief budget was substantially less, totalling just R148m.

This amount was made up almost completely by the provinces’ equitable share allocations, which saw no money allocated to KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, North West and the Northern Cape. The only province which received drought-relief money from Casp was the Western Cape, with R11m.

“The cut in the Casp allocation seen in 2016/17 compared to 2015/16 is due to all programmes receiving a cut in allocations due to fiscal constraints.

“The allocations were made from the Treasury considering available resources,” said departmental spokesperson Bomikazi Molapo.

Treasury spokesperson Phumza Macanda said R1 billion had been allocated by the government in the last financial year to deal with the drought.

Ken Terry, the head of national disaster management at the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, said almost R2bn had been spent on drought relief efforts since 2014.

“It is possible that a department can take funds from other projects and move them to disaster relief.”

Once a province had exhausted its resources on drought relief and declared a disaster, money from the Treasury’s contingency reserve could be allocated to assist.

CAPE TIMES