The government’s new draft fisheries policy, released for public comment on Tuesday ahead of the allocation of long-term quotas later this year, will see emerging small and medium enterprises (SMEs) gaining a greater share of South Africa’s fish stocks at the expense of the industry’s big players.
Speaking in Cape Town at the launch of the policy, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk told journalists: ”If there is only so much, and you have to give to people who never had it before, I think the answer is obvious: there will be a fairer distribution across the board.”
He was replying to a question on whether big fishing companies will, in terms of certain ”key interventions” contained in the new policy, end up getting a smaller share of the total allowable catch (TAC) — the tonnage of a particular species that may legally be caught each year.
Long-term fishing rights are to be awarded during the second half of this year in 19 of South Africa’s commercial fisheries.
According to a summary of the new draft policy, black economic empowerment (BEE) is the first of the five core principles on which it is founded.
This means taking into account ”the level of transformation … and the need to address historical imbalances and to achieve equity within all sectors of the fishing industry”.
Van Schalkwyk said the allocation of new long-term rights is ”worth about R70-billion over the eight- to 15-year period [they] are allocated for”.
Among what the minister has described as ”controversial” provisions contained in the draft document is one to change the allocation of the TAC in South Africa’s seven high-income fisheries, where the industry’s big companies operate.
It calls for 10% of the TAC to be reserved for allocation to SMEs, and a further 10% to be held back to ”reward transformation”.
Affected fisheries include both deep-sea and inshore hake trawl, horse mackerel, small pelagics, Patagonian toothfish, South Coast rock lobster and ”KwaZulu-Natal prawn trawl”.
According to Van Schalkwyk, this reserved percentage of the TAC represents an amount of between R250-million and R280-million a year.
Another key intervention contained in the draft policy says one of the criteria to be used when judging companies’ quota applications will be whether they have in place schemes allowing employees to hold shares in the business.
Speaking at the launch, Deputy Director General of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Horst Kleinschmidt said: ”What we are looking for are proper, well-managed schemes … whereby employees … have a share in a company through some legal instrument or structure.”
He warned against ”schemes that have been labelled joint ventures” in which the workers apparently have a 51% majority.
Some of these are structured in such a way that the ”owner of the vessel or the skipper take off all the cream, and nothing is left for the crew”, he said.
The draft policy also calls for the establishment of registered crew lists for the traditional line-fish, squid and hand-line hake fisheries.
Van Schalkwyk said this will see ”opportunities … created for up to 1 000 more fishers in these sectors”.
In the oyster fishery, individual pickers are to be allocated rights ”so that they will be able to sell to the highest bidder”.
The draft policy, immediately available on the department’s website, will be officially published — in the four ”coastal” languages: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans and English — in the Government Gazette on Friday.
The period for public comment expires on April 11. — Sapa