Commercial fishermen from across the Peninsula have demonstrated outside parliament of South Africa against the suspension of commercial fishing rights in the abalone fishery industry. On February the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marithinus van Schalkwyk, has suspended the 10-year commercial fishing rights allocated to abalone divers in 2004. This creates havoc among commercial fishermen. They accused Van Schalkwyk of misleading parliament in 2007, saying he had assured them a social plan would be put in place to alleviate joblessness following the suspension, but the plan remained to be seen.
According to Oscar Fisher of the South African Wild Abalone Association (Sawaa) suspension has affected people between 3 000 and 4 000 people, which had resulted in rising levels of poverty within fishing communities. He said that they are struggling to send our children to school and to put food on the table. Mteteleli Mboniso, of the Township Fishing Combine, said the suspension was killing us and the government should bring back our abalone.
The fishermen said that they were being punished while the department had no strategy to control abalone poaching which was out of control. In a letter to Van Schalkwyk Sawaa has accused Van Schalkwyk’s department of a number of failures, including to “work to determine the biological status of abalone, the ecological impact of the first year of the suspension period or any form of consultation with the abalone industry.”
According to the organisation the department should come up with an abalone recovery management plan, including socio-economic, compliance, stock rebuilding and research strategies to be developed and implemented in the next 90 days.
