Bold move on abalone harvesting

27 November 2015 - 02:39 By Bobby Jordan

The government plans to give the country's entire abalone fishery to small fishing cooperatives run largely by poor fishermen. The move is likely to prompt a backlash from about 300 commercial abalone rights holders - many previously disadvantaged fishermen from Hawston - who stand to lose their individual rights and their fishing livelihoods.The proposal is in a Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries discussion document circulated this week.It says the resource is too small to support two sectors (small-scale and commercial). Allocating to two sectors, the department said, would mean no one sector took responsibility for protecting the resource, and will result in conflict particularly on small-scale turf areas.The department hopes the move will give impoverished coastal communities an incentive to stop rampant abalone poaching, estimated at about 2500 tons a year.The abalone fishery is worth about R30-million a year.The commercial right holders due to lose their abalone rights are themselves small scale, having typical allocations of a mere 330kg of abalone each a year.Critics of government's approach say fishing cooperatives in the Western Cape have to date been a dismal failure, marked by infighting and financial mismanagement.Also, poaching has become the preserve of crime syndicates which may not share the department's vision of a sustainable resource.Abalone South Africa spokesman Scott Russell said: "This is a low blow to legitimate abalone fishers. The Fisheries Department is clearly acting in bad faith both in the manner in which they are concealing their plans and by even suggesting that bona fide fishers should now be deprived of their livelihoods."But Andy Johnston, head of the Artisanal Fishers Association, said government's move was the only viable way of protecting abalone in the long term."The main vision of the policy is the conservation of the resource. If you own it, you will look after it."At the moment a few are getting very rich and the rest are outside."Department spokesman Palesa Mokomele said harvesting of abalone fit the profile of small-scale fishery and was too small to economically sustain the small-scale and commercial fishing sectors...

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