The battle over abalone is not typically as sexy as other African wildlife crusades. This overgrown sea snail doesn’t set pulses beating among environmentalists in Europe or the United States. Yet the abalone–known on Africa’s southern tip as the perlemoen–is master of its realm, king of the kelp forest. And like the elephant and rhino, it will soon go extinct without protection. Gourmands in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Taiwan pay $60 a plate for the delicacy–and prices are still rising. That has spurred criminal gangs to bear down on the world’s least-protected abalone fishery, a 200-kilometer stretch of the South African coastline. “The authorities are understaffed, underpaid, outgunned and outnumbered,” says Thomas Peschak, a University of Cape Town marine biologist studying the effects of the decline of the local abalone species, Haliotis midae. “The way things are going now, I give the species three or four years.”
That would be the end of a long road. Archeological remains show that southern African aborigines dined on Haliotis midae as early as 4,000 years ago. Commercial fishing began in 1952 in South Africa, and around the same time in other prime breeding grounds off Canada, California, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. In recent years over fishing has led all those countries to severely limit or end harvests of most of the more than 50 commercial species of abalone.
Partly as a result of reduced supply, prices have skyrocketed. That may ultimately make commercial abalone farming economically viable despite the heavy capital investment it requires, say industry analysts. Unfortunately, these creatures grow slowly: it can take a dozen years for an abalone to reach reproductive maturity, when it’s about the size of a bowl of cereal.
This slack between supply and demand has drawn Asian criminal gangs to the region. Exploiting the newly open borders and spotty law enforcement of post-apartheid South Africa, they have established working relationships with local gangsters, who sometimes take their pay in guns and drugs. Black-market “beach” prices for shucked abalone have shot up from about $12 per kilo in 1996 to an average of $35 this year, says Peschak. An experienced scuba diver can strip the sea floor of 50 kilograms of shucked abalone in an hour. (Using a sharp knife and a screwdriver, the diver first pops the gripping foot of the mollusk off the sea floor, then slices it cleanly out of its shell.) Lately the Hong Kong price for dried abalone has gone as high as $90 a kilo. The black-market trade may approach $100 million per year.
South African authorities have tried to rise to the challenge. Since August 2000 a special police unit has arrested 2,377 poachers and confiscated 548,394 abalone. Prosecutors have moved to confiscate convicted poachers’ property, and authorities are considering a total ban on the fishery. But the effort has been hamstrung by corruption–several police officers have themselves been charged with poaching–and the fact that profits remain high in comparison with the penalties, which seldom include jail. A former high-school teacher admits privately he has gone into poaching full time “for the money.” One suspect, caught in his spanking-new pickup, tells NEWSWEEK, “I’m a conservationist, but when there is so much money at stake, who cares about some fish?”
If the poaching persists, the environment will suffer. Abalone constitute the dominant species along the coastal marine ecosystem, and if they go, says Peschak, it will have a dramatic knock-on effect. For instance, without abalone to clean the silt off kelp, urchins and mussels would have no place to settle. Over fishing has already reduced the abalone’s average size, which has degraded the sea floor. “An area rich in biomass is turning into underwater desert,” Peschak says. The abalone’s obscurity makes that no less of a loss.
