When Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced a total ban on abalone fishing last week, he made no friends. Fishing communities, the labour movement, experts and law enforcement officials all condemned the move.
Under immense pressure, Van Schalkwyk buckled a week later, announcing a suspension of the ban until February next year. Despite the climbdown, the South African Abalone Industry Association is pressing ahead with an urgent application in the high court today in a bid to head off any ban.
In an interview with the Mail & Guardian, a ”furious and devastated” Daniel Scheriska, an abalone diver and licence holder from Buffeljagsbaai, described Van Schalkwyk’s original decision as ”uninformed”.
”The suspension of the ban is merely an attempt to win time — eventually he’ll ban us from making a living,” Scheriska said.
”But the real problem is that the government can’t and won’t stop the poachers. And the reason is that the marine authorities are making millions of rands selling confiscated perlemoen, which poachers take out of the sea.” Scheriska, one of about 800 licence-holders in an industry which sustains thousands, has made a living from the sea for 40 years, as did his father and grandfather.
He accused the government of turning commercial abalone fishermen into criminals. ”How else do I feed my kids? A lot of the licence-holders stopped poaching because they were given quotas. If they lose them, they’ll go back to poaching.”
In the belief that he would retain an annual quota for at least 10 years, he had incurred debts by buying a boat and diving equipment. ”Because they can’t stop poaching, they want to stop everybody? It’s a joke,” he said.
He predicted that any government move to restrict legal fishing would encourage the poachers by driving up the price of abalone.
A Western Cape mathematician and member of the abalone working group of the University of Cape Town, Eva Plaganyi-Lloyd, attacked Van Schalkwyk’s move as a ”misinformed” attempt to protect the species from extinction. His ”incorrect and misleading” rationale for the ban had wrongly drawn on her work.
”Unless there are other studies of which I am unaware, I believe the studies he has referred to are, in the main, my work assessing the abalone resource,” Plaganyi-Lloyd wrote in a letter to be filed as part of the high court interdict. Van Schalkwyk justified the ban by saying that the commercial harvesting of wild abalone ”can no longer be justified because the stock has declined to such an extent that the resource is threatened with commercial extinction”.
Yet she insisted her research did not suggest that the shellfish was close to commercial extinction. She said: ”The commercial catch has a negligible effect on the resource; poaching is the factor causing the downward trend. There is no scientific basis for concluding that stopping commercial catches will ensure the survival of the species.”
Members of the South African Police Service’s organised crime unit, who asked to remain anonymous, described the ban on commercial fishermen as ”crazy”. The unit is pursuing about 20 cases of abalone poaching and related racketeering in various Cape Town courts. ”A total ban on abalone is not going to protect abalone — it will have the opposite effect and simply make our lives much more difficult,” said one officer.
”Now the legal guys will be forced to poach — how else will they survive?”
The officer said that in Buffeljagsbaai, near Gansbaai on the south-western coast, legal fishermen extract about 307kg a year, while poachers remove nearly double that quantity. ”We don’t understand why government is not announcing plans to stop the poaching.”
The total allowable abalone catch for 2006/07 was 125 tons, worth about R50-million. By contrast, the illegal abalone industry is thought to be worth more than R3-billion a year.
In just eight of the 20 court cases under way in Cape Town, the tonnage of poached abalone at issue exceeds the total legal quantity fished annually. Police said the illegal abalone trade is run by Chinese syndicates working with Western Cape gangs, particularly the 26s and 28s, both prison gangs, and the Americans. The M&G has reported that much of the drug tik (methamphetamine) is imported by Chinese gangsters and traded for the shellfish.
In the abalone-poaching trials under way in Cape Town, 11 of the accused are Chinese nationals and 82 are South Africans, mainly from the Cape Flats. A total ban on legal fishing would leave the Marine Coastal Management (MCM) — an official management body that advises the environment ministry on the development and conservation of marine resources — as the only legal marketing agency for abalone in South Africa. Yet the MCM is itself selling abalone confiscated from poachers, mainly in Hong Kong, to defray its operational costs.
An MCM employee, who asked not to be named, said the agency ”would, through the ban, create a monopoly for itself to solve its financial woes”.
”Our marines work office hours between eight and four because there’s no money for overtime. The poachers don’t keep office hours. Policing the coast has been steadily getting less effective each year and as a direct result, the poaching is increasing,” said the officer.
The director general of MCM, Dr Monde Mayekiso, admitted that MCM’s law enforcement personnel work only office hours, ”but we will put them on to a shift-system soon — we’re working towards that”. Mayekiso said MCM has made ”around R80-million” this year alone from selling confiscated abalone and has confiscated more than 10-million of the shellfish.