S. African sea snails under threat from poaching surge
JOHANNESBURG: Poverty and crime in South Africa are driving a surge in the illegal harvesting off its shores of the abalone, a large sea snail coveted as a delicacy in some parts of Asia, a report said.
The report, by TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network, found that the region’s abalone population is on the verge of collapse, with an estimated 96 million abalone illegally harvested between 2000 and 2016.
Only around a third of the abalone taken from southern African waters is legal, the report said.
Most affected is the once-abalone rich Atlantic waters off South Africa’s Western Cape province, where chronic poverty and joblessness drive mostly young men to risk shark attack and take the dive in search of the gourmet mollusk.
“Driven by sophisticated transna- tional criminal networks and local gangs, the illegal abalone trade has been fuelled by deeply entrenched socio-economic disparities in the Western Cape, bitterly contested fishing quotas, drugs and gang violence,” the report says.
In 2016 alone, the value of the illegal abalone trade was estimated at US$57mil (RM236mil). There are several species of abalone but the one commercially harvested in South Africa is the South African abalone or Haliotis midae.
About 90% of South Africa’s abalone is destined for upscale restaurants in Hong Kong.
Known locally as perlemoen, abalone plays an important ecological role. According to the South African National Biodiversity Institute, the species helps to keep coastal waters clean by feeding on sea weed and floating weeds.