Sober assessment of the province's approach to dangers of liquor

Sober assessment of the province's approach to dangers of liquor

SOUTH Africa's informal economy employs over .2 million people primarily within urban working class townships.

These residential settlements have grown substantially since 1994 and in the stagnating formal job market now represent a key frontier of business opportunity and a step out of poverty for South Africa's poor. Of the 10842 township micro-enterprises interviewed since 2010, virtually all are unregistered, and informal.

Thirty-nine percent of these trade in food (spazas, greengrocer retailing, food service), and 14 percent retailing liquor; the second most frequent category of business in the township economy. Over 60 percent of these enterprises are female operated with the majority selling less than 10 cases of beer per week. These outlets are recreational spaces that form part of the township leisure economy which includes street braais, musicians, DJs, guards, and casual workers.

In line with a national approach to limit the harms of excessive liquor consumption, the Western Cape Provincial Government recently released the Alcohol-Related Harms Reduction Policy Green Paper (2016) to provide strategic direction to its "game changer" strategy and the Western Cape Liquor Act (2010). 

The Green Paper certainly represents a game changer, mainly in terms of being a frightening regression to apartheid era technocratic cunningly embedded in proposals that differentiate between rich (largely white) and poor (exclusively black) communities. 

Under the guise of a supposed "whole of society" approach, the Green Paper effectively silences important research, tens of thousands of Western Cape microenterprises, their host communities and alternative perspectives. Further, the paper's dominant framing from a public health perspective sets up all challengers to its form of moral panic as being morally deficient.

Yet as we have historically raised in the media, academic papers and public forums, the actions of force-fitting liquor supply control onto the poor will fail and instead enhance economic and social marginalization.

The Green Paper represents an unbalanced approach to development needs and misses an opportunity to mobilize the kind of interdisciplinary knowledge needed to create sustainable impact. It makes no comment on the township economy contribution to livelihoods or economic growth. Given that it represents South Africa's largest collective employer, and the Western Cape township leisure economy reflects 160 000 livelihoods, the omission is glaring.

Instead it focuses on township liquor retailers only, arguing that: "unlicensed liquor outlets that cannot be brought into the regulated space and those who do not comply with the law must face the consequences of the justice system, be prosecuted and closed".

Yet due to their organic emergence, most township businesses (irrespective of the sector) contravene town planning regulations, permit requirements, signage rules, and the operational requirements in conducting day-to-day business. Further; liquor retailing regulations require licence applicants to operate from surveyed cadastres with title deeds in their name and conferred business rights (5 percent of all township land).

In 2010 there were just over 8000 licences throughout the Western Cape. Of these, 1 169 (14.5 percent) had been awarded to black persons. This racial disparity is profoundly biased towards localities like Cape Town's CBD with 1 232 liquor licences in 2011 serving a population of 206 805 people. By contrast, the district of Mitchells Plain (1 112 650 people) has 177 licensed retailers!

While the wine industry creates jobs, worker wages and employment conditions can be abysmal, as the recent documentary Bitter Grapes revealed. Further, the soft approach towards agriculture is glaringly apparent where it discusses foetal alcohol spectrum disorder: "Where there is an issue with cheap alcohol being delivered to their farms, engagement with farmers is required to persuade them to limit such access". The idea that township liquor traders should be condemned and prosecuted for facilitating illegal sales, but commercial (read white) farmers are rather persuaded to "limit" an illegal activity is astonishing.

The paper's silencing of alternative voices and targeting of marginalized businesses to achieve liquor harm reduction will fail. Instead, it will perpetuate the class of wealthy, licensed and predominantly white formal liquor businesses over a sub-class of illegal black township retailers. As such, inequality will deepen and liquor harms will continue to bedevil our society. The dialogue must shift to facilitating partnerships to reshape the township economy so responsible trading is rewarded, leisure offerings are diverse and business owners contribute meaningfully to improving safety within their communities. Silencing those outside public health, criminalizing township businesses ad condemning them for breaking the law is not a workable policy.

• Dr Leif Petersen and Dr Andrew Charman are directors of the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation, a think-tank on micro-enterprises in the township economy with many peer reviewed scientific publications in SA and a range of supporters including SAB.