The government has asked international authorities to ban all trade in South African abalone, in a desperate attempt to stop crime syndicates from completely stripping the coastline of the marine delicacy.
The call comes as police raided Chinese syndicates in inland areas dealing in huge quantities of abalone in the past month. Near Bela-Bela (Warmbaths) almost a ton of the shellfish, worth an estimated R9,2-million, was confiscated on July 28.
Monde Mayekiso, head of Marine and Coastal Management (MCM), said this week that abalone — also called perlemoen — was virtually extinct along the South African coast. Legal trade had been more than halved in the past 20 years in response to the scarcity.
“If this trend continues and we don’t put a lot of effort into stopping it now, we will go out of business pretty soon,” he said.
MCM, a division of the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, proposed that South African abalone be listed by the international Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (Cites). This would ban even the legal trade, worth at least R124-million a year.
“Banning would help other countries know all our abalone is illegal and give the resource time to recover,” said Abeeda Mugjenkar, MCM’s chief director of monitoring, control and surveillance. Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk had approved the proposal and workshops were being held to discuss it with scientists, communities, the commercial industry and neighbouring countries.
Mugjenkar argued that the legal trade was stimulating poaching: “You can’t tell the difference between the real divers and the illegal divers.”
Busts in recent weeks showed syndicates are using neighbouring countries to transport the shellfish to the Far East, where it is a popular delicacy and aphrodisiac. Last week seven Chinese nationals pleaded guilty to illegal possession of abalone in two separate cases.
Police in the Bela-Bela case said the abalone came from Hermanus and was processed at a drying factory on a smallholding inland before being trucked via Beit Bridge to Bulawayo and flown to the East. It appeared the operation had been running for two or three years, and shipments of about 250kg went to Zimbabwe every week.
A Bela-Bela magistrate sentenced three Chinese and a Zimbabwean to a R25 000 fine and two years’ jail, suspended for two years. The four told the court the abalone had been bought from a Chinese connection at Bruma Lake in Johannesburg and they were merely employed to dry it.
Mugjenkar said the Scorpions were investigating documents linking the recent busts to organised syndicates. Last Friday, four Chinese people were arrested in Rustenburg and pleaded guilty to illegal possession of 34 050 abalone. They have yet to be sentenced.
Earlier in July police arrested four Chinese nationals in two separate busts — one in Benoni, the other in the Karoo. The total amount of abalone confiscated in these cases was estimated to be worth R7-million.
The syndicates sometimes use light aircraft that flew under the radar to neighbouring countries, or they managed to bypass customs and smuggled the abalone via South Africa’s main airports. “On many days there is more abalone at Johannesburg International airport than there is in the sea,” said Mugjenkar.
The war against the illegal trade received a blow at the end of June when the Department of Justice closed down the Environmental Court in Hermanus because it was regarded as a waste of resources. Set up in February 2003, the court dealt specifically with marine poaching and other eco-crimes and boasted an 80% conviction rate.
“It was a loss because environmental cases received priority and did not have to compete with other crimes. Now we have to assist a large number of courts and could lose our effectiveness,” said Mayekiso.
Instead, a dedicated unit has been established at MCM to assist the National Prosecuting Authority in marine poaching cases. Mugjenkar said its biggest challenge was persuading magistrates inland that many offenders should be jailed, not just fined and released. “In the Western Cape the magistrates are sensitive to the issues involved,” she said. “But towards the north they often have difficulty in appreciating what we are dealing with. It’s not like drugs, it’s far more serious because of the damage to the resource.”