Fin-fish farms fight it out with green-water tourism needs
Creating jobs and saving the environment is not an either-or dilemma.
When Saldanha Steel closed its plant at Saldanha Bay in September 2020, the West Coast town was hit hard. Roughly 900 jobs were lost at the plant and many associated businesses affected, including the accommodation establishments, restaurants and supermarkets that relied on their business as well as that of their frequent visiting consultants.
So one would imagine the idea of an aquaculture development zone, with fish and mussel farms, would be welcomed by all. That’s not the case in this West Coast tale of environmental impact assessments (EIAs), sharks, jobs and court cases, with the tourism-focused Langebaan leading the crusade against fin-fish farming.
“Most of Save Langebaan Lagoon’s [SLL] concerns are based on what they found on the internet,” says Andrew Maclachlan, a former Saldanha Bay operations manager at Atlas Sea Farms, which farms mussels. He says the Langebaan non-profit’s concerns that the trout and salmon fin-fish farming in Saldanha Bay will harm the lagoon are simply untrue.
Yet SLL member John van der Vyfer says the fin-fish farming, currently in a test phase in the Aquaculture Development Zone (ADZ) in Saldanha’s Big Bay, brings “dangerous sharks’’ and will kill tourism. In particular, he is concerned about the region’s biggest regional business, which is green-water tourism, mainly kite-surfing.
Van der Vyfer lists SLL’s concerns, which were also in its initial 2019 court application opposing the creation of an ADZ. Dismissed by former environment minister Edna Molewa, it is now at the appeals stage, having already cost SLL R800,000.
He speaks of fin-fish farming as “killing the seafloor and deoxygenating the water”. He mentions the lagoon’s status as a Ramsar (internationally recognised wetland) site and notes that an “incorrect EIA” was conducted where the waters of the lagoon and bay mix; a key underwater reef that supports the bay’s ecosystem was disregarded. And that’s before he mentions the sharks that could be attracted by the fish farms.
Inge Frost, founder of Save Langebaan Lagoon, sums up their concerns: “We object to the 42ha zoned for fin-fish farm cages being in the Big Bay area as well as the large-scale, 367ha bivalve [a class of mollusc] farming in the Big Bay zone in front of Club Mykonos and Paradise Beach.”
Frost acknowledges the mussel and oyster farmers’ good record of sustained farming in Saldanha Bay, and that they act as “pollution detectors”, but she says the SLL is concerned that the bay waters will not be able to sustain “such a big volume of bivalve farming”. SLL does not object to the aquaculture farming in the other Saldanha bay zones of Small Bay, Outer Bay North and Outer Bay South.
Currently, the fish farm in Saldanha’s Big Bay, owned by Molapong Aquaculture, is using four of its 42 designated hectares for the pilot phase of its farming venture to experiment with farming sea-grown trout in four cages to assist in meeting growing local demand. If the phase is successful, they will apparently introduce caged salmon.
Seals, sharks and depleted stock
Van der Vyfer describes the fish farm as a “bait ball” attracting “seals, dolphins and dangerous sharks”.
“St Lieu in Reunion and Port Lincoln in Australia highlight how fish farms and sharks have killed watersports tourism,” he says, referring to an industry that attracts multiple global currencies to Langebaan.
Maclachlan dismisses SSL’s concerns to do with sharks: “Sharks dangerous to humans have never been seen north of Yzerfontein; it’s too cold.”
Christo van Wyk, an environmental scientist and the operations manager for the Saldanha Bay Water Quality Forum (SBWQF), says there are no firm rules as to shark movements. “Although [they are] isolated occurrences, local fishermen have observed great whites and orcas in the bay in the past.”
He says bronze whalers, also known as copper sharks, are frequently seen in the bay, but are not dangerous to humans. He says the size of the seal population is the “real concern”. Seal numbers increased with the introduction of the four cages, both outside the lagoon as well as on all the National Parks’ islands, and “the effect of this was clearly visible with the penguin population”.
“To say it is the aquaculture that attracted them is a bit simplistic, but it could have been a factor,” Van Wyk says.
Depleted fish resources and starvation are the reasons why young seals die on Saldanha beaches, he says.
“A fish cage replicates a system under stress, which attracts predators’’ such as seals and sharks, he says, “so there will be a change in animal behaviour”.
Frost says she believes the seals are being attracted by the wild fish stocks that forage below the cages. She says this could have a disastrous knock-on effect on the lagoon’s juvenile wild fish stocks.
Concerns have also been raised about the negative impact trout and salmon would have if they escaped from cages. Van Wyk says experts have given the assurance that “those species cannot sustain a population when released” – in other words, they would be unable to breed if and when released in the lagoon.
“Fish that escape will catch local species as a source of food, but it will be limited and really incident-related. The impact should not be permanent, as these species will die off and not multiply.”
Van Wyk says studies indicate that “the few [four] fin-fish cages have little to no effect at this stage”. As with the mussel farms, however, he says a “larger-scale industry could be problematic if not managed correctly”.
Management and monitoring are thus critical to the environmental and financial viability of the aquaculture venture as it develops.
Maclachlan, who says he was operations director for two farms and a mussel processing facility from 2017 to 2019, and is today a mentor for new black mussel farmers in Saldanha, says the safeguards are there to protect the lagoon’s sensitive environment.
“The Environmental Impact Assessment made provision for safety measures and volumes [of fish] to be phased in over five years. The monitors can put brakes on the project if anything negative happens.”
Monitoring of impacts resulting from proposed projects has been included as a component in the EIA process of numerous countries and entities since the mid-1980s.
The Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries (DEFF) is responsible for monitoring impacts on Langebaan Lagoon “via an approved service provider”. The bay’s waters are already monitored by SBWQF.
Further enlargement of the pilot study fish farm is on hold until the bay is surveyed again because an “abrasion platform/reef” was discovered – after the EIA was granted – during a bay-wide survey conducted on behalf of DEFF below the Big Bay zone.
Employment and tourism rands
Once Molapong Aquaculture’s operation is commercialised, it is expected to provide 38 direct jobs. Most of the aquaculture jobs are found on the mussel farms, says Maclachlan, citing the 25 farms he knows of in the ADZ as providing eight jobs each, with 350 people employed in processing.
That’s a big deal in a town that Mayor Marius Koen says was hit hard by the closure of Saldanha Steel. From a figure of 16.2% in 2019, Alderman Koen says that, “with our current economic modelling, the collapse of the basic metal sector will potentially … take the unemployment rate to 27.4%”.
The mayor knows that tourism is Langebaan’s bread and butter.
“Kite surfing tourism is a R450-million industry in South Africa. Langebaan gets 40% of this, on average,” Van der Vyfer says.
Koen is also aware of the environmental and financial imperatives that govern the combined Langebaan Lagoon and Saldanha Bay economies.
This takes us back to the health of Langebaan Lagoon and Saldanha Bay, because a bankrupt environment will deliver a bankrupt economy: “A full-scale industry will have to be monitored very closely to see the effect on the bay,” says Van Wyk. “The programme in place is world standard, the implementation, however, needs to be checked and monitored and the results should be followed with an eagle’s eye.”