Journalists are seldom specialists, so any investigation into a complex sector like fishing needs to begin as an in-depth conversation with the most knowledgeable person you can find. When it comes to understanding South Africa’s troubled but fascinating fishing industry, few people have as broad a view asShaheen Moolla. A lawyer by training, Moolla once headed the country’s fisheries management and compliance unit, wrote some of the sector’s key policies and has since advised governments, businesses and NGOs on marine and coastal governance.
I sat down with Moolla, not to dissect a single crisis or quota dispute, but to ask a more basic question: how do you even begin to map out this vast and fragmented industry? What are the sectors, the issues and who are the people worth talking to? This conversation sets the scene for a new series of stories that will dig into South Africa’s fisheries – stories of big corporations, small-scale canneries, trek netters, hand line fishers, poachers, policy battles, marine protected areas and the changing seas themselves.
You really have to start with the basic divide: there are the people who fish and then there’s government and regulation. That tension – between communities and companies on the one hand and the state on the other – defines everything. In fishing, the impact of government decisions is immediate and often brutal.
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Quotas, permits, allocations, bans – they can make or break a family or a company overnight. Within the fishing community, you’ve got two big categories: nearshore, small-scale fishers who are usually generational, family-based, often men and women working in traditional communities, and then the commercial and industrial side, which ranges from small family businesses right up to corporates like Sea Harvest, Viking and Oceana. These are the people diving for abalone and collecting mussels or oysters, catching lobster or pulling in line fishes such as yellowtail with trek nets and hand lines.
They’re often from families who’ve been doing this for generations. They’re the “real” fishers, in the sense that this is both their heritage and their livelihood. And of course, there are poachers.
There are three layers. At the bottom are small family businesses – think Kalk Bay outfits that grew from trek-netting into registered close corporations. Then you have emerging black-owned firms, like Letap, which began with line fishing and grew into long-lining for sharks, hakes and jigging for squids and have invested substantially in trawl and squid fishing vessels.
And at the top are the big corporates – Oceana, Sea Harvest, I&J, Viking. They dominate industrial fishing, hold huge quotas and operate expensive fleets. Stagnation.
Some sectors are contracting fast. Anchovy is in deep trouble because of consecutive recruitment failures – we could be looking at a zero total allowable catch (TAC) for anchovy next year, down from 400,000 tons in the mid-2000s. Horse mackerel is unsustainable and the trawl fleet is ancient.
Some vessels were built in the 1950s and 60s. It’s shocking. The bread and butter of these corporations is hake, which rises and falls but overall is fairly steady.
The big question to ask the corporates is: how do you foresee the financial and ecological sustainability of this industry? Why haven’t you invested in new vessels, green technologies, or innovation? And why is the industry so passive in the face of government mismanagement?
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