Expert details the rot in South Africa's ailing fishing industry

A former senior fisheries official explains the science, economics and politics. By Don Pinnock

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Fishing boats off South Africa and Namibia on a single day.

(Graphic: Ship Tracker)

When it comes to understanding South Africa's troubled but fascinating fishing industry, few people have as broad a view as Shaheen Moolla.

A lawyer by training, Moolla once headed the country's fisheries management and compliance unit, wrote some of the sector's key policies and has since advised governments, businesses and NGOs on marine and coastal governance.

He has spent years navigating the politics of quotas, the science of fish stocks, the rise of small-scale cooperatives and the sprawling underworld of poaching. There are parts of the world of fishing where he is feared and deeply unpopular.

This conversation with Moolla sets the scene for a new series of stories that will dig into South Africa's fisheries - big corporations, small-scale canneries, trek netters, handline fishers, poachers, policy battles, marine protected areas and the changing seas themselves.

Don Pinnock: Where to even start?

Shaheen Moola: You really have to start with the basic divide: there are the people who fish and then there's the government and regulation.

This tension between communities and companies on one hand and the state on the other - defines everything. In fishing, the impact of government decisions is immediate and often brutal. Quotas, permits, allocations, bans - they can make or break a family or a company overnight.

Within the fishing community, you've got two big categories: nearshore, small-scale fishers who are usually generational, family-based, often men and women working in traditional communities, and then the commercial and industrial side, which ranges from small family businesses right up to corporates like Sea Harvest, Viking and Oceana.

DP: Who are the nearshore fishers?