Meet the scientists, inspectors and regulators tasked with protecting South Africa’s fisheries – often with outdated tools, shrinking budgets and little public sympathy. For most South Africans, fishing policy feels distant: something that happens offshore, managed by people we never meet, argued about in courtrooms and harbours far from daily life. But the health of South Africa’s fisheries is a strategic national asset underpinning food security, coastal livelihoods and an entire web of industries – from processors and exporters, to dock workers and scientists.
In this series, fishers across the industry have spoken candidly about what they see as failures in the system: shrinking quotas, missed surveys, weak enforcement and a growing sense that the burden of conservation is being carried by communities rather than the state. In response, senior officials within the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment opened their doors, offering a rare, detailed look at how the system actually functions – and how it continues to operate under sustained institutional and resource pressure. What emerges is not a story of denial or defensiveness, but of a department trying to hold together a complex, high-stakes system with finite capacity and resources, escalating compliance risks and increasing stakeholder expectations.
Cheslyn Liebenberg, chief director for monitoring, control and surveillance, is blunt about the reality facing enforcement. “We’ve lost around 100 fisheries control officers over the years,” he says. “At one stage we had close to 250.
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Now we’re operating with roughly 150 to police the same coastline and the same exclusive economic zone.” That loss matters because South Africa’s coastline stretches more than 3,000km and enforcement now contends not only with increasing dependency and poor compliance by resource users, but with international organised criminal networks involved in abalone and lobster poaching as well as local gangs linked to drug trafficking and the firearms trade. For years, fisheries inspectors were unarmed. Patrol vessels were frequently out of service due to maintenance backlogs.
“The poachers innovate faster than we can,” says Liebenberg. “For example, they’re able to procure surveillance equipment and technology bought off the shelf, like drones. We have to go through rigorous procurement procedures, deal with budget constraints and training of drone pilots.
But, even though we don’t have drones, we are supported by other law enforcement partners during joint operations.” Despite this, he points to a system that is far from blind. Vessel monitoring systems and satellite-based AIS (automatic identification system) tracking allow officials to see both local and foreign vessels moving through South African waters in near real time. Foreign fleets entering that exclusive economic zone are flagged, tracked and – where necessary – engaged through flag-state and compliance mechanisms.
“People say we don’t know what’s happening in our waters,” he says. “But we do. The problem isn’t awareness – it’s response capability and sustained presence.”
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