~

On Sunday 31 October Minister Buyelwa Sonjica was replaced by Ms Edna Molewa as Minister of Environmental Affairs. Ms Molewa inherits a department mired in controversy and in need of urgent and efficient leadership. For many applicants in the boat-based whale watching and white shark cage diving sectors, the hope will no doubt be that the new Minister stops the chaos and confusion that has defined the DEA's management of these two sectors to date. It will be an inevitable consequence of the Cabinet reshuffle that the appeals in these two sectors will be delayed even further. The delay may not be all negative as we would advise appellants to lobby the Minister's office directly, impressing upon her the need to urgently correct the numerous legal and factual errors that have been made in the evaluation of applicants to date. The Minister needs to also urgently get a handle on the reasons why openly illegal boat based whale watching operators such as Raggy Charters in the Port Eli...

We are all no doubt familiar with the now infamous hijacking of Kalahari Resources by Sandile Majali (previous funder of the ANC with our taxes) and two of his partners who appear to have been mental patients. It would now appear that with the help of certain leading ANC members in the Western Cape, a black owned Hout Bay fishing company has now also been hijacked. The story goes as follows. In early 2009, the directors of Greys Investments Ltd approached Feike for assistance in attending to certain regulatory and governance matters. Feike agreed to assist on a pro bono basis as Greys Investments Ltd had a 2 ton lobster quota but also had 197 shareholders (12 of whom are now deceased). Greys Investments Ltd had previously been mismanaged by a series of boards with the result that by the time the shareholders met in Hout Bay in 2008 and elected the current board of directors, Greys could not uplift its fishing permit as it owed the SA Revenue Service (SARS) more than R80 000. No fishing...

The date on which written comments on the draft small scale fisheries policy are due has been extended to 5 November 2010. The same comment procedure applies.

Small scale fishers marched to Parliament on 19 October to voice their opposition to the Department of Fisheries' proposed small scale policy. They handed over a memorandum detailing their objections (see article below) to the new the Deputy Director-General of the fisheries branch. A nother SACFC?? Women fishers oppose "community" quotas The fishers hand over their memorandum to the new DDG of Fisheries (left, black suit)

The Department of Fisheries (DAFF) has been in existence since June 2009 when the new administration recognised the critical ecological and socio-economic relevance of marine fisheries and fish farming. Fisheries was then unbundled from the department of "environmental affairs and tourism". However, between June 2008 and April 2009 fisheries was left in limbo as the departments of environment and fisheries fought a bitter turf battle to control fisheries and the marine living resources fund. In the end although the administration of fisheries was moved back to the department of fisheries, the administration and management of fisheries is - frankly and honestly - in complete chaos and free-fall. DAFF and DEA have admitted that neither one actually knows who is in charge of what? Is DAFF in charge of fisheries? Is DEA in charge of the fish in marine protected areas? Is DEA in charge of managing sharks and whales? But don't these fish and mammals subsist in a "fisheries...

More than 2000 small scale commercial and traditional line fishers represented by organisations including the South African United Fishers Front (SAUFF), traditional line fishing organisations and the South African Abalone Industry Association are now united in opposition to the draft small scale fisheries policy primarily on the basis that this policy proposes to allocate rights to "communities" instead of individual fishers and the drafting of the small scale policy has to date completely ignored the interests and investments made by the more than 2000 small scale commercial and aritisinal fishers. Feike has previously pointed out on this blog that by seeking to implement a "community" or co-operative quota system, the draft policy was doomed to fail as "community" quotas are a romantic fallacy of a bygone era and allocation of quotas to co-operatives had repeatedly proved to be a spectacular failure perhaps best highlighted by the South African Commerci...

In 2007, the Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs, Rejoice Mabhudafasi tried to sneak recreational and subsistence fishing into South Africa's oldest marine protected area, the Tsitsikamma MPA. However, once the media exposed her attempt to further threaten an important nursery for line fish stocks, the Minister of Environmental Affairs, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, was forced to abandon the idea. The media expose unleashed an avalanche of adverse opinion from WWF, the department's own scientists and academia that showed how ill-advised such a decision would be - whether from a biological or socio-economic perspective. However, various sources now confirm that Mabhudafsi - still the deputy minister of environmental affairs - is attempting a second covert attempt to get "recreational" and "subsistence" fishers access to the Tsitsikamma MPA. In 2007, the nub of the argument against opening up the MPA to fishing was based on a report by WWF which was accepted b...

Mr Rainer Schimpf of Expert Tours CC, based in Port Elizabeth, has been nominated as The Herald GM Citizen of the Year. Rainer Schimpf wants to make people realise the beauty and vulnerability, as well as the potential, of the diverse marine life the Port Elizabeth region has to offer. Schimpf, an avid diver, offers diving tours in the Algoa Bay area through his company Expert Tours. In his spare time, he tries to raise awareness for the marine environment through his work for Ocean Messengers, a non-governmental organisation (NGO). The enormous potential of starting up a diving tourism business in Port Elizabeth was the reason for Schimpf and his family to make the move from Germany to South Africa in 1999. For the full story, see http://www.theherald.co.za/article.aspx?id=608545. This story was originally published by the Eastern Cape Herald newspaper on 22 September 2010.

The Department of Fisheries held an important consultative meeting with abalone right holders to discuss a range of administrative, management and compliance issues. During the meeting the Department confirmed that 96% of the 150 ton quota had already been fished. The meeting which was very well attended raised a number of important discussion issues including the following: The conditions issued by Cabinet for the opening of the fishery . It is unclear why these conditions were presented to the right holders at the end of the season as opposed to in June (before the fishery opened); Administration of the fishery . The Department sought to encourage right holders to work with the Department by providing the correct information required to process applications and clarified time frames; An integrated security strategy and MCS. The Department reconfirmed its intention to partner with the National Intelligence Agency to root out poaching by investigating organised criminal syndicates. Ho...