Deon van Zyl’s account is a window into the fragile balancing act of South Africa’s small pelagic fishing sector – a sector buffeted by climate, politics and patchy surveys. For the people of Mossel Bay, though, the stakes are clear: when the factory doors close early, the whole town feels it. Nestled on the South Coast in Mossel Bay, Afro Fishing is one of South Africa’s few pilchard canneries – and the only one on this coast.
During its peak season the factory employs up to 400 seasonal staff, feeding not just a market but a town. Deon van Zyl, who has spent more than two decades in the industry, is the chief executive of Afro Fishing with a deep commitment to keeping this small but critical sector alive. We spoke to him about fish stocks, government quotas and the precariousness of staying in business when policy and science collide.
We’re a medium-sized company, competing in the small pelagic fishing sector. We have 29 permanent staff, and in season we employ about 400 seasonal workers. Our cannery is one of six fishing canners in the country and the only one on the South Coast – the rest are concentrated on the West Coast.
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We also have a fishing vessel, ice plant and fish meal and oil processing facility. We process pilchards – or sardines, depending on what you call them. In the industry, “pilchards” refers to the upright, mass-market big cans, while “sardines” is more of a marketing term used for flat cans with sauces like peri peri or lemon.
But they’re the same fish. Right now, it’s government failure – and how that cascades down on businesses like ours. We’re being forced to shut our factory months early for the first time in our history, not because there are no fish in the sea, but because the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment can’t keep its research vessel running and the scientists are forced to work with broken data.
Africana was supposed to do its adult biomass survey in October/November 2024; due to mechanical failure the survey was completed five months later in April 2025. The May recruitment survey was also delayed due to department financial constraints and was completed in July. So we get an allocation cut nearly in half – from 65,000 tonnes in 2024 to 37,000 in 2025 – and we caught our portion of that by 12 May.
Since then, our plant has stood silent. Hundreds of seasonal workers have been sent home early. That means no income for them, no knock-on spend in the town, and a cannery sitting idle in a year when boats are coming back full with little fishing effort.
We know there’s fish out there – we can see it, we can catch it – but the models say “be cautious”. And that’s what makes me furious. The industry has to prove job creation, B-BBEE compliance, capital investment, social spending and skills development to get fishing rights.
Yet the government can simply fail to do surveys on time, take a conservative view, and cripple a billion-rand sector overnight. The result of not getting research surveys done has real economic consequences – and the people paying for it are factory workers, not the policy makers. Quotas are based on annual scientific surveys.
The research vessel Africana is supposed to conduct an adult survey in November and a recruitment survey in May, collecting hydroacoustic and biological data. Scientists feed that into long-established models, which estimate the total biomass and recommend what proportion – traditionally between 13% and 19% – can be harvested sustainably. Last year, because surveys were late and previous surveys were incomplete, scientists opted for extreme caution.
Instead of the usual harvest fraction, they cut it to about 6%. That’s why our allocation was halved. We’re not against sustainability – we sit on the scientific working group as observers, and we support SA Sustainable Seafood Initiative and MarinTrust requirements – but this is overcorrection based on flawed data.
The industry has suggested chartering foreign vessels or even co-funding surveys to make sure they happen on schedule every year. But the department keeps control in house, even as its only survey vessel keeps breaking down. The second big issue currently is that the OMP (Operating Management Procedure) has not been updated since 2018.
The international standard is that countries update their OMP every five years. It is now seven years later and the scientists are still scoping a new OMP. So because this work is late, the industry gets penalised with another level of caution when determining allowable catches.
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