Death no deterrent in poaching war
Poverty drives fishing community to plunder marine resources
● One Saturday night in August, Deurick van Blerk, 26, climbed into his small boat off the coast of Cape Town on another of his illegal fishing expeditions. He never returned.
Investigators are looking into allegations by fellow divers and his family that he was shot by a task force during an anti-poaching operation in an increasingly violent battle between authorities and illegal hunters of abalone shellfish and kreef (rock lobster).
“Deurick and I started poaching when we were 15 years old,” said his cousin, Bruce van Reenen, 23.
“Often we were fishing together, but that night we weren’t. We went on separate boats. I went diving around the corner in Camps Bay and Deurick went to Cape Point for lobster that night,” said Van Reenen.
Divers such as Van Blerk and Van Reenen can earn thousands of rands for a successful night’s fishing.
But it is a fraction of what the dried abalone is worth on the markets of Hong Kong, with prices reaching thousands of dollars a kilogram.
Overfishing started affecting abalone stocks as early as the 1950s, but it was not until the mid-1990s that rampant poaching began to take a grave toll.
George Branch, a marine biologist at the University of Cape Town, said since commercial harvesting began, abalone stocks had been reduced to a quarter of what they once were. And West Coast lobster had dwindled dramatically to just 2.5% of its original population.
“Abalone is going almost entirely to East Asia, predominantly Hong Kong,” said Markus Burgener of the Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, an NGO.
Retail prices in Hong Kong for dried abalone vary from $300 (R4,300) a kilogram to more than $10,000, he said.
“It is ultimately being consumed in China because that is where the greatest demand lies,” he said, and there were huge numbers of people in the commodity chain.
“The real issue is that there are thousands of people involved. It just can’t be sustainable.”
Van Blerk’s family lives in Hangberg, in Hout Bay. It is a poor fishing community where abalone and lobster poaching is a rare source of work.
“It’s a threat for me also because they are shooting at us now,” Van Reenen said.
“But what can I do? I must go on, it’s my life. I lost a cousin, unfortunately, but my life must go on because otherwise my child will go hungry.”
Van Blerk’s girlfriend was pregnant when he disappeared, and has since given birth to a baby girl.
She had waited for him to return at dawn, ready with his regular morning coffee.
But she has heard nothing, and there has been no sign of a body found.
Van Blerk’s two fellow crew members who went out with him that night say he was shot during an anti-poaching enforcement operation that left bullet holes in their boat.
They have since filed a criminal complaint against the authorities for attempted murder.
Khaye Nkwanyana, a spokesperson for the fisheries department, said that investigations were continuing.
You do it because it’s either that, or do I go and rob somebody? Roscoe Jacobs
A resident of Hangberg, the poor fishing village in Hout Bay, justifies the poaching of abalone and kreef
He said the task force “should only fire in self-defence”.
Roscoe Jacobs, 32, who lives in the area, said local people saw poaching as one of the few ways out of poverty.
“It’s not something that people want to do, but because of our socioeconomic conditions it’s something that we are forced into,” he said. “You really do it because it’s either that, or do I go and rob somebody? It’s something that you do at your own risk.”
Jacobs said “conservation needs to be considerate of people”.
“We’ve been living off these resources for more than 300 years and we will live off these resources for 300 years to come.”
The illicit quarry draws divers into a deadly world of gangland violence and international crime syndicates.
In September, police seized a truck heading to Botswana carrying 10kg of abalone with an estimated street value of $400,000.
Last year Chinese authorities broke up a smuggling ring in the southern city of Guangzhou that was attempting to shift $115m in seafood, including abalone.
China’s growing middle class has a near insatiable appetite for abalone, which is a special wedding food.
In Shanghai, one infamous restaurant recently charged $14,700 for a dish for eight people described as “half-headed abalones with frozen sake”.
“Middlemen sell it to a syndicate of Chinese buyers,” one source with knowledge of the trade said.
“The middlemen make the real money, not the poachers.”