Abalone poaching gets deadly
CRACKDOWN: ILLEGAL HUNTER APPARENTLY SHOT BY TASK FORCE AS SA LOSES R863M A YEAR
Stocks of molluscs down to 25% of previous level and rock lobster at 2.5% of original population.
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 murdered, shot by a special task force during an anti-poaching operation in an increasingly violent battle between the authorities and illegal hunters of abalone shellfish and rock lobster.
Abalone is a delicacy prized in Hong Kong, mainland China and elsewhere in east Asia, where dishes featuring the marine molluscs are coveted at wedding banquets and can cost thousands of dollars. Illegal divers also search for rock lobster to sell on the local market.
“Deurick and I started poaching when we were 15 years old,” his cousin, Bruce van Reenen, 23, said, struggling to control his emotions. “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.”
Divers like Van Blerk and Van Reenen can earn hundreds of dollars 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 per kilogram.
Overfishing started affecting abalone stocks in 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 that since commercial harvesting began, abalone stocks have been reduced to a quarter of what they once were. And West Coast rock lobster has dwindled to just 2.5% of its original population.
“Abalone is going almost entirely to East Asia, predominantly Hong Kong,” said Markus Burgener of Traffic, a non-governmental organisation that monitors wildlife trade. Retail prices in Hong Kong for dried South African abalone vary from $300 (R4 303) per kilogram to over $10 000, he said. “It is ultimately being consumed in China because that is where the greatest demand lies,” he explained, saying there were huge numbers of people involved in the commodity chain.
Van Blerk’s family live in Hangberg, a poor coastal community on the edge of Hout Bay some 20km from Cape Town, 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,” his cousin 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 otherwise my child will go hungry.”
Van Blerk’s girlfriend was pregnant when he disappeared, and she has since given birth to a baby girl. She had waited for him to return at dawn, but she has heard nothing and there has been no sign of a body.
Van Blerk’s two fellow crew members who went out with him that night said he was shot during an anti-poaching enforcement operation which left bullet holes in the boat. They have since filed a criminal case against the authorities for attempted murder.
Khaye Nkwanyana, spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, said investigations were ongoing. He added that the task force “should only fire in self-defence”.
Community activist Roscoe Jacobs, 32, said for local people poaching as one of the few ways out of poverty. “It’s not something that people want to do, but because of our socio-economic conditions, we are forced into it. You 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 defended poaching, saying that conservation needed to consider people. “We’ve been living off these resources for more than 300 years and we will live off them for 300 years to come.”
The illicit quarry draws divers into a deadly world of gangland violence and international crime syndicates.
In September, SA police seized a truck heading to Botswana carrying 10kg of abalone with an estimated street value of $400 000 (R5.7 million).
And last year, Chinese authorities broke up a smuggling ring in the southern city of Guangzhou which was attempting to shift $115 million in seafood, including abalone.
China’s growing middle class has a near insatiable appetite for abalone. In Shanghai, one restaurant recently charged $14 700 for a dish for eight called “half-headed abalones with frozen sake”. One source with knowledge of the trade said: “The middlemen make the real money, not the poachers.” –