Industrialised agriculture has largely been touted as a development which could allow African countries to produce enough food for their rapidly growing populations. While this has been evidently true in many cases across the continent, this paper presents a case study, located in Cape Town, South Africa, which pushes back against this narrative. Through three years of participant observation, my research has shown how a small activist group named the PHA Food and Farming Campaign (PHA Campaign) has aimed to push back against the industrial farming model formally established in the area which has laregly relied on pesticides and inorganic fertilisers to increase yield. Drawing on a range of critiques, from the environmentally destructive nature of industrial agriculture, to the continued exploitation and increased precarity of unskilled, seasonal labour, I show how the PHA Campaign has put forward a small-scale 2-hectare agroecological farming model which it proposes can empower labourers, while protecting natural resources in a time of increasing water scarcity. The possibility of “Day Zero: (the day when the taps would run dry in Cape Town) also is shown to be a factor which connects to potentialities of alternative farming models. This paper further shows how the PHA Campaign draws on pre-colonial models of food production to articulate its broader critique of the hegemonic farming model used in the area.
