South African fishers hope new app will gain them extra rights
Small-scale South African fishers hope that a new app that enables them to log their catches will help to persuade the government to grant them greater fishing rights by proving that fish populations can withstand their activity. The Abalobi app has been co-created by the University of Cape Town, the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and the traditional fishers themselves. In 2007, an equality court ruled that traditional fishers should be included in government fishing rights allocations. However, the government has argued that it is impossible to award such allocations when stocks are low.

A smartphone app that logs data on fish catches is giving small-scale fishers in South Africa hope they can persuade the government to allocate them more of what they regard as their traditional fishing rights.

Abalobi, the app which is named for the isiXhosa phrase abalobi bentlanzi, meaning “someone who fishes”, aims to give small-scale fishers the data to empower themselves and convince others.

Co-produced by the University of Cape Town, traditional fishers and the new small-scale fisheries unit in the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), the app lets fishers log their catches. They can record what they caught, when, where, using what method and how much they sold the fish for, among other things.

The hope from local traditional fishers is that more accurate data will demonstrate that fish populations can withstand their harvesting.

Currently, the government refuses to allocate rights to fish for mullet on parts of the country’s west coast because of concerns it will harm fish stocks. Hendrik Bantom, a 48-year-old fisher in the small seaside town of Struisbaai, says that consequences for him and his community are dire: “They are our life source in the long winter months when it is too dangerous to line fish far out at sea.”

Thanks to Abalobi, Bantom has Struisbaai data to add to the assessments of mullet, location-specific data, which he says DAFF lacks. “I have never seen a scientist from DAFF come to determine the mullet stocks in Struisbaai in the past 15 years,” he says. “We can now use the fish catch data on Abalobi phones to show DAFF that there is enough mullet here to feed the community on a sustainable basis.”

The assessment of mullet stock is critical for the Struisbaai community, but the consequences of using Abalobi go much further. For decades, the government has found itself in conflict with about 30,000 traditional or artisanal fishers along its coastline, people who make their living from the sea, straddling the divide between commercial and subsistence fishing.

When fishing rights were divided among commercial fishing operations, traditional fishers – crucial employers and sources of revenue in often poor coastal towns – were simply not recognised. A 2007 equality court judgment found that both the apartheid- and democratic-governments had marginalised these fishers, and ordered the government to include this sector in its rights allocations.

But if stocks cannot support fishing, that order is impossible to implement. government scientists say that mullet stocks are low and consequently no fishing rights are being allocated for their species.

How those scientists reached that conclusion is a matter of contention, complicated by deep distrust of government scientists (and the government in general) after years of acrimonious litigation and subsequent inaction.

David Shoshola, a traditional fisher in Lamberts Bay, which is about 440km up the coast from Struisbaai, says the scientists come once a year to make a stock assessment in an area. They do not, he says, include information from traditional fishers’ catches.

“Government has no way of knowing what the catch per unit effort is of these fishers, because they have very little data,” says Serge Raemaekers, a University of Cape Town academic who has been a key figure in driving the Abalobi project. “They have a little information from the monitors [government employees who are based and the harbour and take note of the fishers’ catches], but that’s a small percentage of what’s actually going on out there.”

The government agrees there is a data gap and some uncertainties. Abongile Ngqongwa, the deputy director of DAFF’s small-scale fisheries management unit, says, “From the simple sample that we have done [as part of the pilot programme], the majority of the resource ... is not even recorded.”

Kim Prochazka, who heads up the government’s fisheries resource research, says that they would be open to using any data that is “relevant and of sufficient quality and quantity” in order to be statistically relevant. “We are hopeful that Abalobi will not only provide data that can be used in stock assessments, but that this will result in an improvement in current data collection models.”

However, collecting a critical mass of data may take a while. Abalobi is growing “organically form the pilots into the neighbouring communities”, Raemaekers says. “If we had it across the sector, we’d have a much better case.”