Scientists are unanimous that culling Namibia’s seals this year makes no sense. But the government is persisting . Fiona Macleod reports
AN urgent appeal has been made to the Namibian ombudsman to intervene in the government’s plan to cull thousands of seals this year, which scientists have warned threatens to wipe out the country’s entire seal population.
International experts say that if the culling is not stopped immediately, the government may have to defend its actions in a court of law because it is contravening its own constitution.
The constitution commits the government to the “… maintenance of ecosystems, essential ecological processes and biological diversity of Namibia and utilisation of living natural resources on a sustainable basis for the benefit of all Namibians, both present and future …”
It’s the clause government officials and the Namibian Ministry of Fisheries use to justify the annual culling of seals: seals are a natural resource, they say, and culling falls within the ambit of sustainable utilisation.
But the experts say that culling this year — and perhaps for many years to come — cannot be qualified as sustainable utilisation. The government’s present culling programme, they add, could prove extremely damaging to Namibia’s fragile economy and its international relations.
An estimated 70 percent of the world’s Cape fur seals live and breed on Namibia’s west coast. Early this year, when the new pups were merely weeks old, an unprecedented natural event — possibly a warm current – – caused fish stocks to move beyond the feeding range of the breeding colonies.
The result — kilometres of deserted beach littered with the carcasses of some 200 000 pups and an unknown number of adults which had starved to death — was widely documented in the media. Not so a report by Namibian scientists advising the government that in the wake of the natural disaster, culling seals this year — and perhaps for the next four to five years — would be inconsistent with sustainable utilisation.
The government’s response was to attempt to suppress the report and ignore its recommendations. It announced not only that it would press ahead with the annual cull but that the quota would be higher than any previous year: 55 000 seals, including 12 000 bulls, will be culled between August and mid-November — that’s if the sealers are able to find that many left on the shoreline.
International experts agree with Namibia’s scientists that this decision gives the lie to the government’s commitment to sustainable utilisation. “With more than 95 percent of the seals born last year certain to die, clubbing the remaining pups to death is not sustainable utilisation,” says International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) official Paul Seigel. “Nor is killing 12 000 bulls in a year when no one knows how many bulls have already died.”
Dr David Lavigne, executive director of the International Marine Mammal Association and one of the world’s most respected seal scientists, adds: “To kill that many bulls, particularly when you don’t know if they are breeding bulls, makes no sense at all. The prudent thing would be to stop killing seals until the impact of this mass mortality can be scientifically assessed.”
And one of South Africa’s leading marine biologists, Dr Jeremy David, points out that “nobody knows if this year’s die-off is a short-lived phenomenon. Nambia could be facing a whole run of bad years and, without being clairvoyant, there is no way of knowing.”
Neither scientific reasoning nor public opinion — at least 70 000 letters of protest have been forwarded to President Sam Nujoma by Ifaw since April — has swayed the government’s course. On the contrary, the Ministry of Fisheries recently announced that it intends eventually to reduce Nami-bia’s seal population to 500 000, for “management purposes”.
In the absence of independent research the ministry will work off its own figures, which claim that the present population stands at about 800 000 and that between 250 000 and 300 000 seals will have to be culled. But the scientists say these figures are arbitrary and that there is no scientific justification for reducing the population to 500 000. Besides, this year’s disaster may already have reduced the population below this figure.
The investigation by the ombudsman, whose report is expected some time in October, is cause for some optimism, say the experts. Even if he is unable to intervene in the culling, it is hoped that the investigation will shed some light on an issue which for years has been shrouded by ignorance, misinformation, emotionalism and which, when viewed objectively, simply doesn’t make much sense.
The most common misconception is that seal culling is a necessary evil to protect the fishing industry, ranked as one of Namibia’s three major revenue earners but which has been steadily declining for several decades.
Fishermen blame the seals because they are such highly visible predators, particularly in large groups. The main culprits behind the myth, however, are the large commercial fishing companies and certain politicians who have an obvious vested interest in finding a scapegoat for the decades of over-fishing along Namibia’s coastline, particularly by Spanish, Russian and Taiwanese trawlers prior to independence.
The Ministry of Fisheries has conceded that the seals are not competing with the fishing industry’s yields, but the myth continues to be perpetuated — primarily as a convenient sop to powerful fishing lobbies.
Lavigne says it’s a scam used throughout the world. In Canada, for instance, thousands of whitecoat harp seals are killed each year because they are blamed for depleting cod stocks — despite conclusive studies showing that on average cod comprises less than one percent of their diet. “It is quite plausible that culling a seal population could in fact be detrimental to a fishery,” he adds.
Marine biologists attached to the University of Cape Town have found that goby make up an average 50 percent of the diet of Namibia’s Cape fur seals. Goby are small, spine-finned fish that are unpalatable to humans.
“Far from competing with the fisheries, the seals are in fact becoming the victims of the industry,” says one of UCT’s researchers. “Their role in the balance of nature has not been fully defined, and may never be, because it has already been affected by over-fishing and the killing of the seal’s natural predators such as sharks and killer whales.”
But there is a far more sinister economic drive behind the culling programme — one which makes little sense in the light of Nujoma’s stated policy of encouraging foreign investment and developing his country’s enormous tourist potential.
This is the fact that the major source of revenue from the culling comes from the sale of the dead seals’ penises to countries in the Far East. The penises are dried, shaved, sprinkled with herbs and sold as aphrodisiacs, fetching more than US$1 200 for a pound. It’s the kind of trade that has virtually wiped out the rhino population, and not one to attract international goodwill.
The irony is that, as far as can be ascertained, the government does not benefit directly from this sex- potion trade. If anyone in Namibia is making a profit out of the aphrodisiacs, it’s the two Afrikaans businessmen who own the sole culling concessions.
Other economic benefits are negligible. The government receives only 50c for each seal killed, totalling just over R26 500 this year; no more than 60 people are employed by the industry, most of them for three months a year or on a part-time basis; by-products such as marine oil and cattle fodder are manufactured from the carcasses, but the demand for these products has dwindled and the revenue is minimal. Consumer pressure put an end to the market for fur coats and other fashion items made out of seal pelts more than a decade ago, and there’s little chance of it being revived.
In 1991 Ifaw approached the government with evidence that seals are worth far more alive than dead: a seal- watching tourism industry initiated in Canada had generated about $1,4-million in a single year. An undertaking was given that a moratorium on sealing would be considered if similar tourist revenue could be raised in Namibia, and if Ifaw agreed to finance scientific research of Namibia’s seals.
An independent report commissioned from an American company showed that if the present number of tourists who visit Namibia extended their stay by half a day to visit seal colonies, the country would earn an extra R1,3-million a year. But the government ignored the report and refused Ifaw’s offer of financial assistance.
David Barritt, Ifaw’s Southern African representative, is at a loss to explain this: “Perhaps it was because they were forced to take sides and decided to choose the side of the sealers … And now, despite the negative effects sealing is having on the country’s international image and tourism industry — it has lost at least 9 200 potential tourists this year and travel agencies are advising their clients not to go there — the officials fear that changing course will entail loss of face and might be interpreted as caving in to outside pressure.”
But there is evidence that those officials are beginning to feel the heat of outside pressure: informal overtures have apparently been made to South African officials to lift the indefinite moratorium on seal culling here, in an effort to deflect the pressure from Namibia. So far the South African government, which introduced its moratorium in 1991 precisely because of sealing’s negative image, have responded with a flat “no”.