The Foreign Fishing Vessel Bogeyman

The Sunday Times on 26 May 2019 correctly highlighted the ongoing frustration by South Africa's commercial fishing industry with confused and contradictory messaging and policy emanating from the South African government. 

The government commands that it wants to "transform" the fishing industry and introduce "new black" right holders to the commercial fisheries but then refuses to allow for foreign vessels and foreign investment into an industry that is overwhelmingly stagnant, incestuous and monopolistic. 

Feike has repeatedly called for the substantive restructuring of the South African fishing industry on this platform and via our Twitter feed. Allocating fishing rights to additional and new entrants may be a start but it is of little benefit if the very government that allocated these new rights strangles the same right holders by forcing them to enter into suffocating and oppressive agreements with the same vessel owners, processing companies and marketers that have always controlled the South African fishing industry. 

The South African tuna long line and horse mackerel fisheries are typical examples of sectors where new entrant right holders see little benefit or opportunity from the 2016 allocation of 15-year fishing rights because the department may have granted them a theoretically valuable 15-year right with one hand but instantaneously destroyed the values of the rights by refusing to allow for strategic and critical structural changes to these industries. 

The horse mackerel fishery in particular requires bold fisheries management leadership and urgent structural change. The use of a dominant single large mid-water trawler cannot be considered economically, biologically or socially sustainable given the objectives of the 2016 fishing rights allocation process. 

New entrants to these fisheries will be able to properly benefit from the allocation of fishing rights to them only if they are allowed to enter into competitive and sustainable joint ventures with the owners of foreign fishing vessels. The current structure of the South African fisheries economy simply does not permit competitive negotiation by smaller right holders in need of access to fishing vessels, processing factories and foreign markets for their fish.