By Clayton Barnes
Tens of millions of rands worth of rock lobster and Patagonian toothfish is poached along SA's south coast every year. The poached fish is frozen, secretly exported and sold at exorbitant prices to restaurants abroad.
This comes despite reports that the availability of the resource had increased after the closure of Hout Bay Fishing Industries and the arrest of its owner, Arnold Bengis, who plundered the South African coastline of rock lobsters in 2004.
The South Coast rock lobster fishery, which Bengis, with the help of 16 other permit holders, had exploited extensively, is a deep-water long-line trap fishery that began in 1974.
Horst Kleinschmidt, managing director of marine resource company Feike and former deputy director-general of SA's Fisheries Department, says the resource had declined by 65 percent between 1989 and 2001, largely due to overfishing by Hout Bay Fishing Industries.
"However, after Bengis was caught and put away, the resource became more available and had increased considerably," he said.
But Dr Johan Groenveld, senior scientist at the Oceanographic Research Institute in Durban, said "Rock lobster poaching is a daily occurrence along our coast.
"There are simply not enough inspectors, and law enforcement is weak. At the moment South Africa does not have the capacity to stop poaching."