SA Town Suffers Worst Drought in Living Memory

Graaff-Reinet, a town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, is currently suffering its worst drought in living memory.

The town, whose population numbers around 35,000, has not seen rainfall for five years, causing serious damage to the region’s largest sector, agriculture.

Zola Hanabe, a smallholding farmer from the area, told how he has lost nine cattle.  “Every time you come to where they’ve died it hurts like anything”, he said.

But even larger, more established farms, like that belonging to David Stern, have been hit hard by the lack of rain.

Stern has been forced to sell off all of his cattle because he simply does not have enough grazing to keep them alive.

This drought is yet further signs of the worrying dangers posed by global warming.

The region is heating up at twice the global average, something that local municipality engineer Ivor Berrington warns; “What we are seeing here now is part of climate change.

“Even in countries where they’ve got lots of water, they’ve got to start realising that the situation is changing drastically”.

This comes as today President Trump formally served notice to the UN of his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, which he hopes to achieve the day after the US election in 2020.

The Paris agreement committed 188 countries to keep global temperature rise below 2C above pre-industrial levels, but the US government claims it puts “an unfair economic burden” on Americans.