Cape fishing communities under threat from new quota restrictions

Western Cape small-scale fishers are distressed by the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment’s announcement of a 16.43% reduction in the Rock Lobster Total Allowable Catch for 2023 and 2024.

The cuts directly impact the small-scale fisheries sector, reducing near-shore allocation from 93.9 to 78.54 tons and offshore allocation from 69.1 to 57.79 tons.

In the Western and Northern Cape, particularly Port Nolloth, small-scale fisheries heavily rely on Rock Lobster as a high-value species, constituting a significant portion of their annual income.

These reductions negatively affect their income, making it challenging to meet basic needs. This comes at a time when Port Nolloth in particular is impacted by widespread destruction of marine habitat by coastal mining operations. At the same time, the government is doing little to combat poaching, and has failed to regulate the international fishing operations on our coastline.

While quotas are often necessary to protect marine life and fishing stocks, the manner of their implementation does not respect local communities, and is asymmetrically enforced, leading to large-scale abuses, as covered by a previous story in this paper.

From 2012 to 2017, the state has only managed to arrest 14 ships for poaching. Of these, none were imprisoned, and the fines ranged from R75 000 to R250 000, well within the risk tolerance for the industry which, in the licit sector alone, comprised of 27 000 individuals, extracted R2.5 billion in profit in 2019, from a total income of R17.5 billion.

The biggest prosecution for poaching so far this century has come not from the South African authorities, but from the United States, who ended up doing the DAFF’s job for them through the Lacey Act, when Hout Bay Fishing overfished their rock lobster quota by 30% to smuggle them into the United States.

The legal and policy framework since 1998 has been seen as criminalising subsistence fishers who, while they were excluded from commercial fishing licenses in the previous regime, were not persecuted for fishing without a license because of the minimal impact of the traditional fishing communities. The commercial industry was dominated by white owners, staffed predominantly by Cape Coloured fishing communities of long standing.

Since the barriers imposed by national authorities have been implemented, small fishermen have taken matters into their own hands, and “protest fishing” took off, particularly in abalone. The new regulatory regime proved far more comprehensive, and as a result of its intention to be exhaustively controlling, became intolerant of traditional fishing communities. This was exacerbated by the policing powers given to Marine Compliance Inspectors. Inspectors are generally regarded, by the general population and by academic literature to be incompetent, corrupt, petty, disruptive, and generally unfit for purpose.

The regulatory explosion in the new dispensation has pushed artisanal fishers out of the industry, and cut the amount of available jobs for small fisheries. The redress of racial inequalities is also not being addressed in a manner which includes the traditional fishing communities, and it is the resentment of these conditions which drives and attitude of righteous defiance among the indigenous fishermen.

The industry is also heavily impacted by black economic empowerment. The hake trawling industry, which forms the largest part of the fishing economy as a whole, was 66.6% black-owned according to the latest annual review from the South African Deep Sea Trawlers Industry Association. The top three hake trawling operations have a Level 1 certification, and the fourth has a level 2 certification. This upper layer of highly “transformed” companies dominate the industry. In 2015, the top six companies held 88% of the total allocated catch.

This systemic exclusion of traditional fishing communities has been well-documented, and its impact on the communities classified as Coloured has been to disrupt a way of life to which the indigenous people of the Cape have been accustomed to for hundreds of years, and which forms a continuity with ancient fishing communities stretching into time immemorial.