Chinese tastes push lethal abalone
trade By Gavin du Venage
Poaching of rare species to serve a
growing demand in Asia is a sore point for
conservationists in Africa. But as a recent haul
of ivory in Hong Kong attests, the authorities in
China are aware of the problem and are beginning
to address it. For some species, however, it may
be too late.
While the focus is on
high-profile trade in rhino horn and elephant
tusks, less-glamorous species slip through the
cracks. One such is abalone, a humble mollusc that
is being pushed to the brink of extinction off the
South African coastline.
An unholy
alliance of South African drug gangs and Chinese
criminals has resulted in reefs being stripped
bare of the creature; the proceeds of the poaching
are ending up in sprawling slums on
the outskirts of South
Africa’s cities, fueling a deadly drugs trade.
"We're not making much headway... we're
not winning the war" Johann Augustyn, South
Africa's head of fisheries research and
development told a special parliamentary hearing
recently. Augustyn said Chinese syndicates were
behind most of the poaching. These groups were
also heavily involved in drug smuggling and human
trafficking, he told parliamentarians.
Under-resourced and undermanned, local
environmental authorities are helpless to slow,
let alone stop, the trade. Abalone is rarely
consumed in South Africa, but it is a delicacy in
the Far East. It can be bought at markets in Hong
Kong and Shanghai, where it is sold openly on the
streets. Unlike rhino horn or ivory, it enjoys no
special international protection.
Found
mostly along the southern coastline where the cold
waters of the Atlantic mix with the warmer Indian
Ocean, the abalone cling to rocks below the
waterline. Poachers, equipped with scuba gear and
thick wetsuits to keep out the chill, use crowbars
to pry the creatures off the rocks. Diving from
high-powered rubber boats, they gather abalone in
sack-loads, which are then transported to waiting
four-wheel drive vehicles on the beach.
Occasionally environmental officers arrive on the
scene. Often outgunned and outnumbered, they are
frequently driven off in a hail of bullets.
The poachers themselves are usually from
poor coastal communities, where unemployment runs
as high as 80%. They sell the abalone on to
representatives of gangs based in Cape Town, South
Africa's second-largest city, and home to some of
the most violent criminal organizations in the
world.
With names like "The Americans" and
"Fancy Boys", these gangs run large sections of
the outlying low-income areas of Cape Town, a
world beyond the graceful streets and cloud-capped
Table Mountain that tourists associate with the
city.
The gangs hand the abalone to
Chinese criminals, who pay not in cash but with
crystal methamphetamine, imported from China,
India and Pakistan. This is then cooked into a
lethal local drug known as "tik". Authorities here
say at least 300,000 people use half a gram of tik
a day - a demand of 150 kilograms daily that must
be fed.
As a result, dozens die each year
from drug-related overdoses and related hazards
such as gang violence: in September, for instance,
a six-year-old girl was shot in the head as rival
gangs battled it out while she was playing outside
her home in the Cape Flats, a poor district
outside Cape Town. On November 4, police fought
rioters outside the town of Hermanus, an hour from
Cape Town, after they attacked officers who had
arrested suspected poachers. A 13-year-old boy was
shot in both legs and a police officer was badly
burned in the incident.
Security in these
areas has become so bad that Helen Zille, the
premier of the Western Cape province, has appealed
directly to the national government to send in the
army to aid the outgunned police. She also wants
the area to be put under a state of emergency,
akin to martial law.
Substance abuse
cannot be blamed on Chinese operators of course;
but the current trajectory of exploding
methamphetamine use can be linked directly to the
demand for abalone. "It's no secret that organized
Chinese gangs - triads - are behind this," says
Shaheen Moola, a lawyer and MD of Feike, a firm of
natural resource management firm in Cape Town.
"This level of smuggling and drug importation
would not be possible without them."
Until
2003, methamphetamine was virtually unknown in the
Western Cape region, where a damp climate makes
drying of its basic ingredients difficult. But
abalone is usually sold in its dried form, an art
that is familiar to Chinese purveyors although
virtually unknown in South Africa. Dried abalone
are also easier to store and transport. The result
is dozens of drying factories, often operated out
of private homes scattered around the country,
says Moola.
"The price of abalone depends
very much on the skill with which it was prepared
and dried," notes Moola. "Drying is an art and
very few South Africans can do it."
t was
the realization that drying ovens used to prepare
abalone for shipment could also be used to dry
crystal meth that was the catalyst for a whole new
drugs trade in the region.
For the
poaching and drug dealing syndicates, it's an
especially lucrative tradeoff. An investigation by
The New Age newspaper in Johannesburg found that a
night's haul of abalone could be exchanged for at
least 100kg of ephedrine, the key component of
crystal meth. This would be sold to a drug gang
for $3,500. Once cooked into 'tik' it would be
sold for up to $350,000 - a huge return for a
night's work at sea.
The effect on the
abalone population has been devastating, and along
with it, the commercial fishermen it once
supported.
In 2005, around 300 holders of
legal commercial fishing rights and their families
depended on harvesting abalone. As the stocks
plunged however the authorities were forced to
reduce the total annual allowable catch from 615
tonnes to 125 tonnes for the 2006/7 season and 75
tonnes for the shortened 2007/8 season. In
February 2008, South Africa took the unprecedented
step of banning harvesting entirely.
Stopping the illegal trade is complicated
by the lack of international protection.
Previously, South Africa had abalone listed with
CITES, the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora in
2007. This had provided legal ammunition for
importers such as Hong Kong to check that abalone
stocks had valid export permits and were from
legally harvested sources.
In 2010 the
South African government withdrew the listing
because it lacked the resources and manpower to
implement it properly, says Markus Burgener,
senior program officer for TRAFFIC, the
international wildlife trade monitoring body.
The CITES implementation was so shambolic
that all it did was threaten the livelihood of the
few remaining legal exporters, who struggled to
get the permits they needed to authorize
shipments. When exporters threatened to sue for
lost export earnings, the government delisted
abalone.
"By exiting the CITES agreement
the South African government removed the only
international legal tool the Hong Kong authorities
had to monitor whether imports were legally
harvested or not," says Burgener. As a result, up
to 90% of abalone exports to the territory are now
probably from poached abalone, he says.
While cross-border trade in ivory and
rhino horn is being tightened up, the abalone
trade is largely ignored. Lacking the appeal of
elephants and rhinoceroses, the abalone's future
is bleak.
Gavin du Venage is a
business writer in South Africa, specializing in
commodity and investment analysis.
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