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"The Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, Dr Dion George, has indicated that he will endeavour to finalise his decisions on the appeals lodged against the decisions taken by the Deputy Director General: Fisheries Management on exemptions for the 2024/2025 Abalone fishing season, by 31 October 2025. Minister George has emphasised the importance of concluding the process without delay, as the livelihoods of many fishers, their families and coastal communities depend on timely, fair and lawful decisions in the abalone sector." This is from a statement issued by the Fisheries Minister on 4 September 2025 regarding appeals filed against a decision by his department to summarily deny 179 abalone divers permits for the 2025 abalone season which ends on 30 September 2025 .  The Fisheries Department had commenced "investigations" into apparent unlawful fishing by divers in November 2023. By December 2024, they had finalised these investigations without ever i...

On 22 August 2025, Minister Dion George denied a request by small-scale fishing co-operatives to be permitted to use commercial fishing methods (trawling, long lining & purse seining) to harvest fishing rights allocated to the co-operatives.  Essentially, the small-scale co-ops are saying that fishing rights allocated to the co-ops - such as hake hand line quotas - are of zero value because they cant fish for hakes and small pelagics without access to trawl, long line and purse seine gear. George is correct to deny the co-ops access to "commercial" fishing methods as it would indeed contradict the legal basis for establishing the small-scale fishing sector and the co-operative system.  But the decision of course points to 2 fundamental contradictions and policy failures: The first is that his department has unlawfully insisted on allocating a portion of the squid TAE to co-ops in the Eastern Cape, thus effectively granting them access to the very commercial gear he is den...