Fished out: Wildlife group objects as South Africa lifts abalone ban

By John Platt
Jun 23, 2010 05:00 PM South Africa will lift on Friday its nearly three-year-old ban on commercial abalone fishing, a move that a wildlife group says will send the highly valued and highly poached species spiraling toward extinction.

Known in South African as perlemoen, abalone (specifically the Haliotis midae species) has long been a cash cow for the nation’s fishermen, with thousands of tons taken from coastal waters every year. Although there is a legal, regulated abalone industry in South Africa, much of that catch has been illegal; it is caught by unlicensed poachers and smuggled to Asia where abalone is valued as a purported aphrodisiac. Organized crime syndicates, primarily Chinese triad gangs, have been the major players in this field. The Triads often pay for the perlemoen with methamphetamine, which in turn has fueled an increase in violent crime throughout South Africa. In 2006 South African authorities confiscated more than one million perlemoen from smugglers (representing just a portion of the total amount believed to have been poached). In 2007 and 2008 South Africa took several moves to slow the devastation of its abalone population: First, it lowered the allowable commercial quota for perlemoen, then it added abalone to Appendix III of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), meaning it could not be exported without a permit. Next, realizing that lowered quotas were not enough, it banned all commercial abalone fishing, a move that affected about 1,000 fishermen. In previous years South Africa had repeatedly lowered its commercial quotas for abalone fishing because poachers had taken so many of the shellfish from the water that there was little left for legal fishermen, and the species risked commercial extinction (meaning there would not have been enough left in the water to support the industry). Now, both the commercial ban and the CITES trade restrictions are being lifted, and TRAFFIC International, the wildlife trade monitoring network, says that is a bad move. “Removal of the CITES listing effectively puts South Africa back to the situation in the past where it has to tackle rampant and well-organized abalone poaching, and illegal trade on its own,” Markus Burgener, senior programme officer for TRAFFIC, said in a prepared statement. “Such a decision is hard to understand for a wildlife product where almost all of the trade is international and where there are very high volumes of illegal trade. This is precisely the sort of international wildlife trade problem for which CITES was established.” TRAFFIC says it has seen no reduction in the levels of poaching and smuggling for perlemoen, and that opening up trade will only make the problem worse. …