ABSTRACT
The Berg river basin, located in the Western Cape Region of South Africa, provides the bulk of the water for household, commercial and industrial use in the Cape Town metropolitan region as well as irrigation water to the lower part of the basin to cultivate roughly 15,000 hectares of high-value crops. Since the early 1970s, water consumption in municipal Cape Town has grown at an average annual rate of about 3 per cent. As the population of the metropolitan Cape Town region grows, the competition for water in the basin has become intense, and farmers have responded by dramatically improving their irrigation efficiencies and shifting even more land into the production of high-value export crops. Meanwhile, over the past two decades, a number of national and regional commissions have been set up to investigate options for coping with the long-term water supply problems in the basin.
