ABSTRACT
The Berg River Basin is located in the Western Cape Region of South Africa (see Figure 14.1). The upper Berg River Basin is an economically important water supply system in the Western Cape that provides the bulk of the water for household, commercial and industrial use in the Cape Town metropolitan region. It also provides irrigation water to the lower part of the basin to cultivate roughly 15,000ha of high-value crops, primarily deciduous fruits, table and wine grapes, and vegetables both for domestic and export use with strong multiplier effects in the domestic and national economy. Since the early 1970s, water consumption in municipal Cape Town has grown by around 300 per cent, fuelled largely by in-migration. As the population of the Metropolitan Cape Town region grows, the competition for water in the basin has become even more intense and farmers have responded by dramatically improving their irrigation efficiencies and shifting even more land into the production of high-value export crops.
