S07G07-Green Parliament Small Scale Fishers March 23 2014.pdf

L J F Green, 2014. ‘October 2013: Parliament Meets Small-‐Scale Fishers’, p. 1

October 2013 -- Parliament Meets Small Scale Fishers1 Lesley J F Green Environmental Humanities Initiative School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics University of Cape Town, South Africa Draft chapter2 for monograph provisionally titled The Parliament of Fish: Science, Democracy and Fisheries in South Africa Correspondence to: [email protected] Anger about the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998 has coursed through South African fisheries since the day it was signed into law by then-President Nelson Mandela. The Act, also known as the MLRA, sought:

To provide for the conservation of the marine ecosystem, the long-term sustainable utilisation of marine living resources and the orderly access to exploitation, utilisation and protection of certain marine living resources; and for these purposes to provide for the exercise of control over marine living resources in a fair and equitable manner to the benefit of all the citizens of South Africa; and to provide for matters connected therewith.3

The law affirmed the continued scientific management of the ocean via technologies of “Total Allowable Catch” and “Total Allowable Effort”, and it affirmed in law the methods of fortress conservation: the definition of marine protected areas; the establishment of a network of marine enforcement officials; a system of permits and quotas and methods of fishing; it criminalised non-compliance, and it defined categories of fishers in a manner that excluded from its convocation the category of small scale fishers. Neither “commercial” fishers involved in heavy industry, nor “recreational fishers” who fished for leisure, nor “subsistence fishers” who fished only for their own households, fishers who wanted to fish to make a living were not recognised in law. Fuelling the widespread anger was that the weight of apartheid’s race categories was heavy in these types of fishing, since industrial fisheries had benefited over decades from apartheid’s social engineering; recreational fishers were largely drawn from the wealthier classes who were generally white,4 and the category ‘subsistence’ fishers bound people to an ethnological analysis that was as limited as it was limiting. The impact of the Act has been extensively documented in regional research as having resulted in a loss of confidence in conservation and enforcement,5 a decrease of compliance with legislation; increased hunger and the loss of food security; increased poverty and dependence on the state, and diminished support for South Africa’s ruling party among fishers.

1 Draft chapter for a manuscript provisionally titled ‘Parliament of Fish: Science, democracy and fisheries in South Africa’ by Lesley Green. © University of Cape Town. 2 I am grateful to Jackie Sunde, Lance van Sittert, Barbara Paterson and Marieke Norton for comments on an earlier draft. 3 Opening paragraph of the Marine Living Resources Act 18 of 1998, as amended by The Marine Living Resources Amendment Act 68 of 2000. Republic of South Africa. 4 For a summary of the argument in the mid 2000s, see Naseegh Jaffer and Jackie Sunde 2005, “Fishing rights or human rights?” in SAMUDRA Report No. 44 July 2006, pp. 20-‐24. 5 See: Marieke Norton, ‘At the interface: Marine compliance inspectors at work in the Western Cape’ (PhD manuscript, University of Cape Town, 2014); Marieke van Zyl (2009) Ocean, time and value: Speaking about the sea in Kassiesbaai. Anthropology Southern Africa, 32 (1&2): 48–58; Oliver Schultz (2010) Belonging on the West Coast: An ethnography of St Helena Bay in the context of marine resource scarcity.MA dissertation, Dept of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town; and Maria Hauck, 2008. Rethinking small-‐scale fisheries compliance. Marine Policy 32: 635–642.


A successful court challenge to the Act on which judgement was passed in 20076 forced government to provide an “interim relief measure”7 which offered an individual permit exemption normally used by recreational fishers, to a new category of “artisanal fishers,” an umbrella- category for excluded fishers.8 Five years later, a nation-wide programme of activism and consultation among fishers headed by the non-governmental organisation Masifundise and the community based organisation, Coastal Links, along with several academic researchers working on environment and justice, led to the drafting of the Policy for the Small Scale Fisheries Sector in South Africa 2012 (DAFF 2012). The Policy established a framework that sought to define “small-scale fishers” as a category in public life, and restore dignity and access to resources to fishers. It introduced itself thus:

This policy aims to provide redress and recognition to the rights of Small Scale fisher communities in South Africa [who were] previously marginalised and discriminated against in terms of racially exclusionary laws and policies, individualised permit-based systems of resource allocation and insensitive impositions of conservation-driven regulation. In line with the broader agenda of the transformation of the fishing sector, this policy provides the framework for the promotion of the rights of these fishers in order to fulfil the constitutional promise of substantive equality. Indeed, in terms of our Constitution, the State is committed to respecting, protecting, promoting and fulfilling the rights of Small Scale fishers in South Africa.

The Policy for the Small-scale Fisheries Sector was gazetted in June 2012. A little over a year later, draft legislation in the form of the Marine Living Resources Amendment Bill of 2013 was released, based largely on the proposals in that Policy. The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee for the relevant government ministry, the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), announced:

“In line with Parliament’s core objective of facilitating public participation and involvement in legislative processes, the Portfolio Committee on Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries will conduct public hearings in Parliament on the Marine Living Resources Amendment Bill [B30-2013] on Tuesday, 15 and Wednesday, 16 October 2013. … The Bill seeks to amend the Marine Living Resources Act, 1998 (Act No. 18 of 1998) …Interested individuals and interested groups wishing to comment on the Amendment Bill, are kindly requested to forward written submissions to the Portfolio Committee by no later than Friday, 11 October 2013. Stakeholders interested in making oral submissions are also requested to contact our office by no later than Friday, 11 October 2013.”

Thus it was that an assembly of humans bearing suits and t-shirts, chiffon and denim, balding heads, braids and dreadlocks found itself pitting economy with ecology, while seated together on the green leather benches of Committee Room V454 in the Old Assembly Building. The venue was more familiar from television screens as the Chamber of Parliament. It was the same room in which the laws of apartheid had been defined via an alliance of race sciences and social sciences; it was the same room in which the architect of apartheid himself had been assassinated by an orderly; the same room in which the release of Mandela had been argued for 27 years, and the same room in which the last apartheid President F W de Klerk had announced that Nelson Mandela would be released from prison unconditionally. (A curious error had concluded that speech: he had prayed that the “Almighty Lord will guide and sustain us on our course through unchartered waters”. The devil being in the detail, of course: “uncharted” would have meant

6 For the judgement, see the case known as “Kenneth George & Others v Minister Of Environmental Affairs and Tourism” , http://www.lrc.org.za/images/stories/court_texts/georgefishersorder.pdf 7 See Moeniba Isaacs, 2013. Small-‐scale fisheries governance and understanding the snoek (Thyrsites atun), supply chain in the Ocean View fishing community, Western Cape, South Africa. Ecology and Society 18(4): 17. 8 Jackie Sunde notes: “The Court allocation of IR was made to the fishers involved in the court action only and hence was restricted to the class of fishers represented by Masifundise Development Trust and Coastal Links in the Western and Northern Cape”. Personal communication, March 16 2014.


“unknown”, but “unchartered” spoke of waters that had either not yet been hired from their owners, or were not yet governed by charters of rights, license, or public privilege.9)

Twenty three years on, the convocation of those who had responded to the call for comment was welcomed by Parliamentary Portfolio Committee chair Mlungisi Johnson with a greeting that offered equal dignity to all present, surrounded by the technologies of Parliament: push-to-talk microphones; translation headsets; video screens; piles of photocopied documents; a projection screen for PowerPoint presentations. On the in-building side of the great security x-ray machines at the entrances, alongside the Library of Parliament and surrounded by Members of Parliament who are on the Committee, scientists, capitalists, representatives of trades unions and several fishers organisations took to the floor to speak. Where consultants, unionists, scientists and Parliamentarians had been heard here many times before, it was the fishers’ impassioned submissions from all four coastal provinces that were more of a rarity inside these walls. While several fishers’ groups have made representations to Parliamentarians since 1994, it was also the case that eight years before, some of the same fishers who would speak here had chained themselves to the gates outside Parliament in order to be heard.10 Before the two-day hearing was done, the audio equipment would have conveyed at least five languages in which 36 speakers had mapped the challenges of harvesting coastal resources in the Republic’s oceans – an area that extended 200 nautical miles out to sea over almost 4000km of coastline, and which exceeded the terrestrial assets of the Republic.11 On the first day of the Hearings, veteran fisheries activist Andy Johnston summed up the fishers’ struggles with the words, “It has taken us the fishing communities six decades of struggle to get to this point of actually now being recognized as people who can take their rightful place in society. In the pursuit for fishing quotas there was a general tendency to tell a lie, live a lie and behave like a wolf in sheep's clothing, and this had and still will become the winning recipe for many opportunists, who were extremely successful in obtaining fishing quotas in order to enrich themselves. … through this immoral individual allocation system that makes a mockery of ethics and righteous behavior.”

The opening presentation on the second day was from Naseegh Jaffer from Masifundise, an NGO that had led the successful court challenge in 2007. While Masifundise acknowledged that others may have differing views, he said, he urged the government to look at what the majority of fishing communities across the country were saying. Fisher folk who had been denied rights wanted those rights returned.”12 The second speaker, the organiser of the community-based organisation Coastal Links, began with a formal greeting in isiXhosa:

Honorable Chairperson and portfolio committee members, fishers of our beloved country, officials of DAFF, I greet you all on this important occasion for the small scale fishers of South Africa. I am Lulamile Ponono from the clan of Tshawe, Togu, Ngconde, Madange kaTshiwo whose umbilical cord is buried in Cebe. My nearest town is Centane, under the Mnquma municipality in the Eastern Cape. Here I am going to speak as a fisher, whose parents were fishers, grandparents were fishers and great grandparents were fishers. I believe I represent the views and feelings of many fishers from where I come from. We fish as individuals but in a group and we share common rules not individual rules. It is always safe and less boring to fish as a group. Although I am from Cebe, I fish in the waters between Gqungqe on the north and Nxaxo on the south. I know fishers from Gqungqe and Nxaxo and they also know me. As fishers we have common experiences, aspirations and needs. We face the same conditions and challenges. Most importantly we have families to feed and communities to build.

9 FW de Klerk, Speech at the Opening of Parliament, 2 February 1990. http://www.fwdeklerk.org/index.php/en/historically-‐significant-‐speeches. Accessed January 5 2014. 10 SAPA, ‘Fishers protest outside Parly’, 29 May 2005. http://www.fin24.com/Business/Fishermen-‐protest-‐at-‐parly-‐20050529-‐3, accessed 8 Jan 2014. 11 South Africa’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) includes both that next to the South African mainland and that around the Prince Edward Islands, totalling 1 535 000 km2. Its land area is approximately 1 220 000 km2. 12 From the report of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, 2013. Marine Living Resources Amendment Bill [B30-‐2013]: Public hearings Day 2. http://www.pmg.org.za/report/20131016-‐marine-‐living-‐resources-‐amendment-‐bill-‐b30-‐2013-‐public-‐hearings-‐day-‐2, accesed 8 Jan 2014.


From KwaZulu-Natal, Mr Lindani Ngubane from Coastal Links thanked the Committee for allowing him to present on behalf of the KwaZulu Natal (KZN) SSF communities, whom, he said, were using traditional techniques of fishing such as fish traps. The summary of his comments appears in the report of the Parliamentary Monitoring Group, as follows:

“Oppressive laws such as the MLRA needed to be swiftly changed, and his community was happy that the Bill would make changes that would liberate those communities. … The KZN SSF … were particularly anxious that the Bill should accommodate traditional and customary fishing techniques, and if these were included, then they would be happy to support the Bill. … Mr Ngubane said that the KZN SSF supported the legal entity as envisaged in the amendments, and particularly supported the fact that a specific community may choose to have co-operatives, trusts and whatever other legal entity was suitable.

Mr Ngubane said that in Kosi Bay traditional fish traps were used, which were similar to others in the world, and which allowed small fish to grow without being harvested. Fish would enter the traps at high … tide. That showed that the traditional techniques were also committed to conserving, managing and controlling the harvesting of the fish along that coastline. …He noted that this type of fish harvesting was not only for subsistence fishing but it also had an impact on the local tourism economy, because tourists came from far to see those “fish kraals”. …

Mr Ngubane said that the KZN SSF (Kwa Zulu Natal Small Scale Fishers) supported co-management and believed that a collective structure, which would also involve Amakhosi (Traditional Leaders) and the DAFF (Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries), would solve many matters before they became problems. In such structures, all SSF stakeholders could share problems, ideas, information, and promote and protect their MLR.

The submission from the Paternoster community on the West Coast by representative Neil Joshua, noted that the Bill “was supported by pre-harvest, the post-harvest, the net makers, tackle and bait sellers, and workers and sellers of fish” in Paternoster. From the PMG account:

“He said that Interim Development Quotas (IDQs13) had divided their communities because some benefited more than others and fishers who were not registered were branded as poachers. … Doringbaai, he said, had first-hand experience of the IDQ systems failures, where Oceana had closed down its operation, after receiving the long term right to create employment, ensure food security and provide income for SSFs to provide for their children. When Oceana closed, the community was left with nothing. A broader system that allowed the community to partake equally would be preferable. Doringbaai itself was a small fishing village with a population of about 2000 residents. Most people there were fishers, Having started, in 2007 [when the Interim Relief Quotas had been awarded to some fishers in the wake of the court battle], to think about the possible different structures, they decided on co-ops [co-operatives]. … In 2013, the co-ops had earned, for their community, R2.4 million. …

The Parliamentarians themselves listened with great interest and were invited to comment at regular intervals. As the oversight committee for the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries under Minister Tina Joematt-Petersen, they were drawn from six political parties representing widely differing points of view, and their task was to compile a report, for Parliament, on the effectiveness of the Ministry and make recommendations for changes in the legislation. While the submissions offered for the Parliamentarians’ consideration unique accounts of experiences and a wide range of concerns, the themes were familiar: multi-generational fishers’ rights had been lost; they needed to be restored; individual quotas were problematic to some. But it was Selene Smith from Langebaan in the Western Cape who took

13 Jackie Sunde, for many years a fisheries activist employed by Masifundise, notes: “Although the community refer to these as quotas this is a left-‐over influence from the general quota system and in fact the IR [Interim Relief] was not a quota system, although it’s very telling … that [it has] come to reflect a quota system.” (Personal communication, March 16 2014)


the debate from a list of concerns, to an ecology of knowledge, environmentality, history, and race. Her opening comment was addressed to fishers’ themselves: “We must stop saying that we fishers know nothing and understand nothing. We are never too old to learn.” She speaks of having decided, in the 1990s, to empower herself and become a fisheries activist in Langebaan, and then encountering the fishers’ organisation Masifundise. “Langebaan,” she declared, “supports this Bill 100%. It [the MLRA] must change. In that way we traditional fishers can attain that for which we fought all those years.” Those who can speak, she said, are those “who know the heartbeat of a fisher,” and she thanked the newly reorganised Department for being responsive to Langebaan fishers. “Our forefathers were born there [in Langebaan]. … In the old apartheid years we were taken from our own homes [living places] where we lived. And now the sea has also been taken from us, where we fished for traditional fish for all the years.” She defended fishers’ capacity to self-regulate: “We looked after our own fish. Our people had their own rules on how to catch fish. They can make their own rules among themselves: “After Friday evening you don’t go to sea any more, you can go to sea Sunday evening again …”.” She challenged the law enforcement: “And I must say to you most of our people become criminals, that they are locked up even if they get lost in the mist they get locked up.” She challenged the legal framework of environmentalism: “And I must say to you, people … we must have a hard look at the MPA [the Marine Protected Area] … because at the moment they are only interested in looking at conservation, that’s all, but not at the livelihood and the social responsibility concerning the fishers.” She challenged science: “And I am sorry to say this to the Department: I sat at a round table … and I am sorry, but I just said to one of the researchers, “I don’t like your attitude at all, Mister, you must listen, you can’t tell me [what the truth is]; when last was the research done … ?”

She challenged the idea that the tourist industry would bring benefits to local communities: “People wring the tourist industry around the fishers’ necks … and we are told “We pay, we say.” She challenged the conservationists: “We, in Langebaan, to catch fish, we have to share it with thousands, millions of seals. And we cannot make a living. … But at the moment we respect the laws that are in place. But people, I need to say to you: what is valid for one must be valid for another. We are not allowed to fish in the MPA [Marine Protected Area]. But there are three whites who are allowed to catch fish there. And what are we supposed to call that? We must call it apartheid … I cannot give it another name.” She explained the history of that particular rights allocation via long-standing, race-based social networks in Langebaan, linking it to an old 1991 allocation of fishing quota, and turned from that argument to the history of struggle since then: “And I must say, for too long we have fought for this law, and too long we have fought for this policy. This policy is one we actually wrote ourselves. We went in to our communities and asked, how do you see this policy? … And that is what we did. But other people now want to come and push themselves in. People, I have to say,” referring to someone who had spoken the day before and questioned the idea of community rights, “Mister, put your foot in Langebaan and you will have me to deal with. I want him to know … he must not come to Langebaan to mislead the fishers. … People were prepared to sit around the table. … It’s a democratic country, it’s a land that we can speak more freely in, it’s a country in which we all need to be able to talk even to the president. In the past we could not do that.” Her story here turns to her own life: “I grew up on a farm, and I must tell you this. When I … when the Girlie [ironic referral to the farmer’s wife] the Girl, to whom I had to say Good evening Girl, Good evening Baas [Master], good evening Kleinbaas [Master’s Son]”. And she asked me to come and sleep in her house when the Baas and the Kleinbaas were not there, [but] I was not allowed to take my own mattress. I had to sleep on a hard mat under the kitchen table. I know apartheid. I know what it is to be hurt. I know tears. The same for all my community.” Her submission turns here to the time when they heard that, after the Court Case, they would be getting interim relief permits, and in an evening meeting they had come to a decision: “We said [to ourselves], what we get, we will put in a pool and we will also help those who don’t have. It is not all fishers who can make a decision like that. Because each must weigh for himself, that is why people are still fighting. But those fishers who decided that night [to work together], gave us a mandate to act on their behalf. We decided that the little that we had, we would share with other fishers … because they have experienced what


goes on inside a house. They have experienced that what leads to hunger [ie a policy that benefits only a few], will make them suffer hunger themselves. I thank you.” 14 A submission on the complex ecology of democracy itself, her account wove together the issues of race and self-respect and what it is to be a person; knowledge, law, policing, tourism, old elites, new elites, histories, environmentalities, species, economies; the creation of categories of actors in law. Her comments underscore that what is at stake is not only the question of political ecology (how to make just decisions on who could harvest from the sea), but the question of the ecology of politics. Her challenge to this assembly is a challenge to the modernist framework that has driven environmental policy in the Marine Living Resources Act, which focused on legislation to conserve both the resource and the industry. It was a powerful presentation; although in an economy of ideas in which power-point lists predominate the techniques of argument, it was almost inevitable that her intensive account (in which she weaves her life experience with her knowledge of fisheries management systems) would be translated into an extensive account of “things to do”, and thus lose its power to transform the fundamental questions about knowledge and democracy that she addresses.15 The question related closely to Brno Latour’s AIME project, which hones in the points at which dialogues break down, in democracies, over the ecology of knowledge, and it is to that that I want to turn: first, what is it that the range of actors who drafted the MLRA could not hear, in what she proposed, and second, what is it that the Parliamentarians themselves are not seeing.

What the final MLRA of 1998 neglected to acknowledge, notwithstanding the input of various environmentalists and social scientists,16 was that the particular categories of fishers they had proposed were not ‘self-evident natural kinds’ (subsistence, recreational, industrial) but had arisen in the course of history and were profoundly inflected by race.17 Second, there was an enchantment with the idea, in some sectors of fisheries conservation, that the big commercial companies could harvest in a controlled way and supply at scale, and would be easier to police than allowing many new entrants in – without attention to the inevitable: that fishers who found themselves defined as poachers would refuse to comply, and therefore render the careful management of environmental resources all but impossible. Third, the dominant idea was that the solution to the race-based ownership of capital-intensive fisheries was to require them to transfer substantial shares of ownership to a new class of historically disadvantaged entrepreneurs. That approach did not change the problematic structure of the industry: the exclusion of small-scale fishers, and the framing of marine research and catch reporting in single-species stock assessments rather than an ecosystem approach. So confident in the independence and impartiality of science were the marine environmentalists and other political actors who drafted the MLRA, that they paid little attention to the historical effects of race and capital on knowledge itself. The ecology of knowledge was not in their purview; the idea seems to be that 14 Selene Smith spoke in Afrikaans. This is my translation from the audio recording of the proceedings. 15 As a representative of Langebaan fishers, her account differs from others in the region, since the Langebaan ecology is based around a lagoon and has been relatively stable. Fishers from communities elsewhere along the coast have experienced great hardship after species have shifted southwards and eastwards along the Atlantic coast, with consequent impact on factories that found themselves having to truck catches that were being made, for the first time, much further afield. 16 See B.M. Clark, Hauck, M, Harris, J. M., Salo, K. and Russel, E. 2002. Identification of subsistence fishers, fishing areas, resource use and activities along the South African coast. South African Journal of Marine Science 24: 425–437; Barry Clark, 2000. Subsistence Fisheries Task Group (SFTG) Report 1: identification of subsistence fisher communities, areas and resources, unpublished report. 17 See L. van Sittert, G. Branch, M. Hauck, M. Sowman. 2006. Benchmarking the first decade of post-‐apartheid fisheries reform in South Africa. Marine Policy 30 (2006) 96–110; David Crosoer, Lance van Sittert, Stefano Ponte. 2006. The integration of South African fisheries into the global economy: Past, present and future. Marine Policy 30 (2006) 18–29; Moenieba Isaacs, Mafaniso Haraa, Jesper Raakjær. 2007. Has reforming South African fisheries contributed to wealth distribution and poverty alleviation? Ocean & Coastal Management 50 (2007) 301–313.


justice simply had to be aded to ecology; in the parlance of marine management, the challenge was to “add the human dimension” to fisheries managment. The nett effect, in the words of South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, was that of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” By giving insufficient recognition to the small-scale fishers and limiting their commercial opportunities, the best conservation strategies imaginable provoked their opposite: creating a new underclass class of environmentally disenfranchised poachers and a series of successful court challenges, pitting fisheries managers against fishing communities; and creating a very troubling alliance between capital, science, policing, the prosecutions system, and prisons – all of which is being questioned, here, in an historical assembly in the Old Assembly Building. Through the promulgation of the Marine Living Resources Act in 1998, the ‘categories’ of fishers took on a social and political life (and death): they came into existence and were forced out of existence by decree. Yet people’s experience was profoundly at odds with those categories, in much the same way as they were with the ideology of race classification that undergirded apartheid.18

South African scientific community has yet to engage the implications of the reality that the categories of race were created via an alliance of science and a particular elite, using particular technologies available at the time, to carve out a particular object: at the time, a race category, with which political technologies and policing and courts concurred and enforced as an objective and a moral reality. Certainly, no-one would dream of continuing to use the particular technologies that served to define race, which at one time included the notorious ‘pencil test’ administered by bureaucrats: did a pencil, when stuck into the hair of the person whose race was in question, stay in or fall out? Nor would scientists continue to use the tools and techniques of more formal race classification based on the agreed scientific criteria of the 1930s. For the most part, that history of natural science has been brushed off as either “bad science” or “bad apples” or both. Yet what has not been engaged in South Africa is the implication: that science and scientific technologies emerge in society, and reflect its interests; that an “expanded reality” of science in society is something to engage and work with, rather than deny. It teaches a vital lesson: that the capacity of science, courts, Parliament and law to bring into reality a version of the world that is at odds with the experience of many, is something to fear. Such a fear is the beginning of wisdom. If something as close to the everyday as racial classification can be instantiated in public life, then there is the potential for other scientific classifications to create objects that are similarly mis-identified. The beginning of wisdom, I want to suggest, in debates on decolonial science, is to recognise the integration of science with society, rather than desperately cling to the argument that science is Science.

Notwithstanding the reliance of my argument here on the work of Bruno Latour, I also want to point to a difference, in the South African context, with Latour’s account of Parliaments in Europe. Unlike the Parliaments described in Politics of Nature,19 in which the modern constitution – the division of nature from culture – generates a politics that is uneasily confined to matters socio-cultural while leaving authority on nature to scientific experts, the Parliament of post-apartheid South Africa has explicitly sought to question the imbroglio that is capital and science, and challenge its centrality, its authority, and its modes of verification. The South African government has set itself the enormous challenge of questioning the relationship between scientific accounts of nature and African knowledges, whether in the arena of medicine (specifically HIV-Aids) or in the scientific management of natural resources. My concern here, as

18 Martin West, 1989. ‘Race’ in Sharp, John and Boonzaaier, Emile. 1989. South African Keywords. Cape Town: David Philip. 19 Bruno Latour, 2004. Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


in earlier work,20 is to try to navigate a way through the pitfalls of relativism, moralism, nationalism, or scientific rationalism. The task is to understand the ecology of knowledge within a democracy. In regards to environmentalism, this means that the discussion shifts from creating the knowledge of ecology, to exploring the ecology of knowledge. In the former, science is the eye of the needle – the old gate of Jerusalem -- through which all camels must kneel to pass. In the latter, the challenge is much greater, yet much more amenable to making peace in a world in which there are many knowledges and ways of knowing, and in which we want to find terms on which we can work towards agreement about what is real and of concern, without requiring knowledges to be first transformed into objects that match the scientific.

The ecology of democracy is a central concern in the work “Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy” in which Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel assembled an enormous range of accounts to demonstrate the imbroglio of politics, science and nature. An exhibition that sought to familiarise publics with the possibilities for widening the frame of reference of political debate to include the natural, it sought to problematise the worldview in which science and society are separate institutions. A central concern for them is the problem of reaching agreement on ecological controversies, and the presentation of scientific evidentiaries in politics. “[T]he more we move into ecological controversies,” wrote Latour and Weibel, “the more important it becomes to consider an ecosystem as a sort of assembly without walls, inside which many types of “speakers” are allowed to “have a voice”. Not because we want to imitate the usual parliamentary settings, but, on the contrary, because it’s obvious that the traditional sites of politics have to move toward the center of gravity of ecology. Ecology is not about a naturalization of politics – as if one wanted to “treat humans like plants and animals”; it’s about the recognition of the immense complexity involved for any entity – human or non-human – to have a voice, to take a stand, to be counted, to be represented, to be connected with others. From the beginning of modern science to the contemporary engineering of rivers, landscapes and agriculture, it’s clear that the number of speech instruments and apparatus as immensely increased. Without these many mediations, no representation would be possible. If we have to live from now on in the assemblies of nature, we had better be aware of the procedures that make them either nurturing or deadly, livable or tyrannical.” 21 At issue in the traumas attached to South African fisheries, is both the “nature” that can be ennumerated and tabulated in a commercial marine environment, and “the nature” of the groups of fishers – let us call them actors – in the region’s fisheries. And this is where the imbroglio of science, race and society is central: scientific racism produced race categories through a series of technical measures, introduced those into Parliaments like South Africa, and enacted laws that brought these categories into life, wealth, suffering, poverty and hunger. The same room in the South African Parliament, by the (un)virtue of its history of convening assemblies of racial science in the service of capital, is a Parliament of nature – a Parliament of Human Nature, one might say, that instantiated in South Africa the reality of race categories that had not existed as such before: categories that would split families; define people’s worth; imposed limits on education, economic activity, places of residence, quality of medical care, the colours of lovers, taking seat on a park bench or entering through a door, and whether the stories your parents told belonged in a museum of cultural history or a museum of natural history. In a country whose engagements with modernist thought were framed by an obsession with legal definitions of personhood in order to define forms of presence in the polis, it was both an accident of history and not at all an accident, that the focus of the the debate in what one might call the Parliament of Fishers, in October 2013, attended primarily to what form of legal personhood should be afforded to small scale fishers, and secondly to whether, in a marine

20 See Lesley J F Green, (Under review). ‘Viral Politics, Arthropod Politics: Parliament, Democracy and Lobsters in South Africa, 2012’; Lesley J F Green, 2012. Beyond South Africa’s ‘indigenous knowledge’ versus ‘science’ wars. South African Journal of Science. 2012;108(7/8), Art. #631 21 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 2005. ‘The Parliaments of Nature’ , pp.458-‐459 in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Massachussetts: MIT Press.


environment in which fishing rights are managed via single-species rights, small-scale fishers be allowed “multi-species” rights. On the form of legal personhood, at issue was the establishment of a legal mechanism to ecologically enfranchise traditional fishers without rendering them as “traditional”, which would encumber them with a burden of historical and ethnological proof, and limit the range of fishing possibilities. The concern was to align that new form of legal personhood with the terms of legal personhood accepted by the Department of Trade and Industry, in order to be able to release capital investments and loans to fishers to establish larger businesses. It was a very important moment for the constitution of South Africa’s Polis, in which capital has had an unreasonable level of public trust to set the terms of political life. Where Europe and North America have battled with an unreasonable faith in the economy that could be defined by bankers, South Africa’s democracy has battled with an unreasonable faith in the ability of capital to provide the terms of political restitution. The work of fishers, then, is to offer an alternative mode of assembly before the law, yet that mode of assembly runs the constant risk of translation (or perhaps collapse) into a class of association that is defined by the principles of capital. It is a tiny moment of infinite significance: what Mrs Smith describes – an association of sharing – is required to conform to the principles of legal personhood in order to be verified. On the one hand, what was achieved was a huge victory for the fishers, very much part of what the Small Scale Fishers Policy refers to as a “paradigm shift”:

“This policy introduces a paradigm shift and new policy approach to the Small Scale fisheries sector. The Department recognises that the new approach must address the existing need for transformation, the progressive realisation of human rights within affected communities, developmental objectives and current economic realities, and the ecological sustainability of the resource; and contribute to community well-being and development.”

On the other hand, the requirement that the form of association be formalised into a corporation required fishers to form the equivalent of a company; be trained in the techniques and strategies of bureaucracy – a process that is important but not without flaws, as Nadasdy describes in the Canadian context with Hunters and Bureaucrats. 22 At the meeting in Parliament, Mr Dawie Phillips of the town of Port Nolloth in the Northern Cape province, tried to mediate the contending concerns:

Mr Phillips greeted the gathering in Nama, but spoke in Afrikaans. … [He] said that the amendments proposed would help the community to gain legitimate use of the sea, as their rights would be recognised for the first time. For the [Small Scale Fishers] of Port Nolloth, the previous arrangements had been little better than apartheid and had disempowered them in the same way. He had now heard arguments for and against the Bill during these two days. He could well understand that some interest groups were against the amendments, because they were assets unto their own sector. If [Small Scale Fishers] were not given autonomy and independence they had little choice than to become assets to the big fishing companies who could employ and exploit them, and that had to stop. Port Nolloth [Small Scale Fishers] saw the Bill as empowering them to own their own boats, to have their own processing plants and to trade on their own behalf, both domestically and abroad. He said that co-ops, formal and informal, were not new to the community, whose whole way of life was essentially a co-op of mutual assistance essentially, because when someone had plenty they shared with those that had nothing. Mr Phillips said that he hoped that when the amendments were passed they would give [Small Scale Fishing] communities access to capital, which would enable them to improve their way of life sustainably for their forthcoming generations, along with improving their business management skills which, in turn, would lead to better communities.

The Parliament of Fishers, as assembled on October 15 and 16 2013, is reaching for a redefinition of the ecumene and the economy of fishers: the fishers are both asking for a

22 Paul Nadasdy, 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats. Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-‐State Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press.


redefinition of ‘legal personhood’ and a transformation of the economy of fisheries. Curiously, the second of several insistences is the demand for multi-species rights: that one does not only get allocated a linefish right or a shark right or a crayfish right, but that one can legally collect multiple species. In this sense the discussion of “multi-species rights” in Parliament on those two days, is very different to the use fo the term “multi-species rights” in decolonial debates and contemporary philosophy. “Another World Is Possible!” is the collective cry of many across the decolonial south. Yet in contrast to decolonial environmental rights activism in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and New Zealand, the cry in South Africa is to expand the rights of people over nature within given capitalist and modernist frameworks, rather than to establish the rights of nature in the polis itself. The reason for that, I want to suggest, is that the “nature” of post-apartheid political landscape in South Africa is tightly bound up to capitalism, and that fisheries activism in South Africa has focused on rights of access to a commodified version of nature: a marine ecology of extractable objects; a political ecology of “biomass” as defined in the language and methods of the Total Allowable Catch calculations. Where the Small Scale Fishers Policy of 2012 calls for the “ecological sustainability of the resource” – it is not arguing for the rights of the sea, or of Langebaan Lagoon, it is arguing for the sustainability of harvests. Why this matters is that the fishers’ challenge here is not only to align the law with the already accepted new Small Scale Fishers’ Policy, but it is also a challenge to the ecology of modernist democracy in South Africa, and I want to suggest that fisheries activists here who focus on fishers’ indigenous knowledge might have a very rich dialogue with environmental activists elsewhere in the south whose critique of the global economic system generates a refusal to go along with capitalist definitions of nature as an extractable resource. For a South African anthropologist like myself, the question what ideas are at work here, in Parliament, is an important one to try to think with “alongside” (rather than “about”, which replicates the practice of colonial ethnology). My question is what efforts to unmake the legacy of modernist thought are in evidence in the fishers’ presentations, and how might they offer insights into the unmaking of the legacy of modernity and coloniality in the ecology of democracy. The question is: is there an ‘ecology of ideas’that we can develop that is sufficient for the struggles to be framed usefully, in partnership with the fragile marine ecology in a time of climate change and diminished resources, in order that the most appropriate and useful solutions can be found? Is it possible to formulate an environmentality that does not replicate the conceptual errors of modernity and coloniality, and the devastations of landscape, sea and personhood that have accompanied them? Or is what is at work in Parliament, here, a combination of a skilful use of environmentality and strategic self-representation? The word ‘ecology’ comes from the Greek ‘oikos’, which, as I have noted, is the root term for all three of the sectors of struggle: the economy, the ecology, and the ecumene, i.e. the relationships of collective life which, like any household that produces its own food, include both humans and non-humans. In that oikos, the ecology, the economy and our collective ecumene are part of our household. Whether we think of that household as four walls or a planet of seven seas, it does not matter. The point is that it offers a unifying approach that releases us from the problem of separating nature from human action – and different way of doing environmental politics. The anthropocene demands nothing less than the recognition that the “metaphysical machine” that is modernist thought has caused a great deal of trouble on the planet. What might it mean to rethink the oikos as a whole, and do politics in a way that reconstitutes the oikos as a whole? Might it be possible to reframe an environmentality on terms other than the “nature” that gave us race? Bruno Latour, introducing his project titled An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, poses the challenge to the Modernist Constitution thus:

“We have to fight trouble with trouble, counter a metaphysical machine with a bigger metaphysical machine. … The hypothesis is ludicrous, as I am very well aware, but it is no more senseless than the project of an architect who offers his clients a house with a new form, a new arrangement of rooms and


functions … . “And if you were to put science over there, while reolcating politics over here, at the same time you run the law underneath and move fiction to this spot, wouldn’t you be more at ease?” … Such castles in the air have to be judged by the only test worth its salt: would the potential inhabitant feel more comfortable there? … At bottom, that is what it is all about: can one institute the Moderns in habitats that are, if not stable, at least sustainable and reasonable? More simply, more radically: can one offer them a dwelling place at long last? After all those years of wandering in the desert, do they have a hope of reaching not the Promised Land but Earth itself, quite simply, the only on they have, at once underfoot and all around them, the aptly named Gaia?”23

What I want to do here is go back to the remarkable submissions, on 15 and 16 October, and focus on the debate about ecological knowledge, and the argument that fishers indigenous knowledge needs to be added to the science in order to make environmental science equitable. The accusations that science is misleading and that indigenous knowledge needs to be included as a matter of justice and equity is an argument with a morality that I would want to support, yet we know from the experience of the war over science and indigenous knowledge in relation to HIV that the moral force of argument is insufficient grounding for the enormous responsibility of democratic decision-making. At the same time, as I have argued here and elsewhere, a retreat into a narrow scientific rationalism does not enable scientific argument to find an exit from the weight of its own history. To think outside of this polemic requires work. I want to open my contibution to this discussion with the Small Scale Fishers’ Policy, in which section 6.2 speaks of the allocation of Small Scale fishing rights:

“This section elaborates on the paradigm shift in the approach to the Small Scale fishing sector that is introduced in this policy and discussed briefly in section 4. This shift introduces a new approach that recognises and draws on age-old local traditions and practices of catching, harvesting and managing marine living resources among Small Scale fishers. At the same time, the new approach seeks to address the ecological sustainability of the resource, the progressive realisation of socia-economic [sic] human rights within affected communities and current economic realities. [my emphasis]

The challenge here to traditional knowledge and practices is to be effective in terms of the regime of markets and capital: fish become a resource to sustain; access to catch them is about socio-economic rights and economic realities. Economics – access to capital – is the framing logic. In this moment, the traditions are transformed into the service of capital; yet this is at once a very dangerous move. Philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers speaks of the need to disentangle science from capital as a concern, in the knowledge economy, that is as great as was the need to disentangle knowledge from the church in the 1600s.24 The work is echoed in MP Meriam Phaliso’s concern, as explored in the previous chapter, that science is misleading because in her terms marine science is invested in a particular form of capital. I am in agreement with her on that point. Yet I am not in agreement with the thinking that the solution is to formalise indigenous knowledge in relation to the interests of capital. Rather, I want to draw yet more deeply on fishers’ ecologies of knowledge to rethink the relationship between knowledge and society altogether. From the PMP report of the meeting, Ms Phaliso intervention was as follows:

Ms Phaliso … urged the Small Scale Fishers to look towards their indigenous knowledge, saying that science could be misleading. No information had been furnished on alternative marine species along the coastal belt until the day of the hearings. She noted that environmental awareness and conservation were nothing new to SSF communities.25 She reiterated most of Mr Joshua’s and Mr Goliath’s sentiments about the sharing of wealth from the SSF sector. She heard the support for the amendments, and the

23 Bruno Latour, 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp.22-‐23. 24 See Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, 2011. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the spell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 25 Yet, as noted by fisheries activist Jackie Sunde, many of the fishers were from families who had lost fishing rights during the apartheid years, and their knowledge of fisheries had been acquired in factories and on board commercial vessels. (Email, 16 March 2014).


mandate to this Committee to produce a piece of legislation that would guarantee food security to the SSF sector.

Ms Phaliso’s concerns are urgent, and vitally important to hear; they ought not to be disregarded or patronised. And they are echoed by the only white fisherman who presented, Mr Andries van der Merwe of the Helderberg Artisanal Fisheries association:

Mr Van der Merwe said that SSFs were fisher folk, knew the sea, and knew how to sell their fish, but the conservation scientists’ knowledge about when and where fish could be found was flawed. He invited scientists to consult fishermen when they were doing their conservation work. He thought that Ms Steyn’s observation about Mr Moss’s assertion was skewed; all that SSFs were saying were that they should equally be consulted. He urged DAFF [the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries] to listen to the SSFs and investigate carefully what the scientists were saying. In 2000 the line fish committee scientists had said that there were 93 tonnes of line fish left for breeding in the ocean. In the December /January season of 2000/1, fishers had caught 99 and 120 tonnes of Cape salmon respectively. SSFs should be represented on the scientific committees. They had thorough knowledge of the fish stocks.

The question underscored the relation between knowledge, compliance, management and policing, and catch reporting, all of which are missing in the MLRA of 1998, because the fundamental flaw of that legislation is in its own ecology: it had failed to understand that rolling out law, penalties, the threat of criminalisation, and a new police force equipped with new technologies of surveillance would not be sufficient to establish environmental-mindedness among fishers. Here, the Small Scale Fishers Policy sets out an alternative ecology of democratic practice:

The policy seeks to give guidance on how the relationship between the Small Scale fishers and the marine living resources and ecosystems that these fishers harvest and their livelihoods depend upon, will be managed and work in practice. In adopting an approach that is community-based and supports a community orientation, the policy further recognizes the need to balance consideration of human rights while ensuring the ecological sustainability of the resource. The policy proposes … involving Small Scale fishers and coastal communities in decisions about the harvesting and management of the resource, as well as in the monitoring of the sector. Co-management will furthermore promote community participation in natural resource management initiatives and projects. [my emphasis]

In other words, already in play is an effort to redefine an environmentality that is not bound in to the practical outworking of racial superiority in ‘whiteliness’,26 in which the environment becomes the new “white man’s burden” to save. The question of how to work with fishers’ knowledge – a term that itself slipped easily into the category of ‘indigenous knowledge’ -- was put back to the only scientist who presented at the hearings, Prof Doug Butterworth, who heads the mathematical modelling group at the University of Cape Town that is tasked with calculating the Total Allowable Catch. From the Parliamentary Monitoring Group’s report, the closing discussion was as follows:

Mr Bhanga …noted that … Mr Moss had alluded to the fact that the SSF felt that the conservation scientists did not always balance their science with indigenous knowledge and the needs of the people. He asked how a correct balance could be achieved, addressing poverty with available resources in a responsible and controllable way and balancing this against environmental and conservation needs. He asked if Prof Butterworth had any suggestions. He asked if implementation of the SSFP was likely to be detrimental to the conservation of the MLR or whether it was possible to come up with an alternative environmental-friendly policy that would also address the needs of the marginalised SSF community. He said that there

26 I refer here to the work of feminist writer Marilyn Frye, after Minnie Bruce Pratt. See Marilyn Frye, 1992. White woman feminist. In Willful virgin: essays in feminism. Freedom, CA: The CrossingPress. http://www.feminist-‐reprise.org/docs/fw2.htm. [accessed 16.10.13].


was a need to inculcate, in citizens, the balance of indigenous knowledge with modern developments. One of the presenters also had commented on the overregulation of the SSF sector and said that conservation scientists over-emphasised conservation at the expense of livelihoods. There had to be a balance. The environment should respond to the socio-economic needs of its immediate occupants. The rigidity of conservation protection for depleted MLR were the exact reasons that led to poaching, and there were problems in continuing this path. He asked Prof Butterworth also to speak to that point. In essence, the scientists thought they had a monopoly over the environmental needs, and the SSFs thought that they had a monopoly over their poverty. Prof Butterworth clarified that the DAFF [Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries] scientific working groups were appointed by the Chief Director of Research at the DAFF and they consisted of scientists who were appropriately qualified people, with full rights to speak, and decisions were taken by consensus. The National Professional Scientists Act specified who was regarded as a scientist and who was not qualified, but there were also observers allowed in those groups. Fishery science was not a science of isolated pockets and it was accepted that interactions were needed not only with those who had indigenous knowledge - the fishermen – but also management and compliance people, who were represented on working groups. Industry fishermen were allowed as observers, at the discretion of the Chief Director of Research, who had taken a liberal stance. Although there was, formally, a distinction between members and observers, in fact contributions were welcomed, although it must be accepted that sometimes it was only the scientists who would be able to discuss the most technical issues. Prof. Butterworth urged Ms Phaliso and Mr Bhanga to bear in mind that there were indigenous people with rights to be considered in the USA, and they had made inputs to their similar committees on indigenous knowledge. Internationally, indigenous knowledge was recognised, with the qualification “that [it] could be objectively verified”. That meant that pure anecdotes should be distinguished from genuine and verifiable input. On the point that scientists were perceived as too rigid, he noted that fisheries management was not easy. On the previous day, he had been involved in serious debate abut the penguin situation and how that was linked to sardine availability – which may lead to debates about the possible decrease of sardine fishery operations, which might lead to disadvantage to some small scale operators in order to benefit the recovery of the penguin colonies – a matter that required a trade-off. The scientists’ fundamental responsibility was to present the decision makers with the qualifications of those tradeoffs. This example showed that there were not easy issues. Prof Butterworth responded to Mr Bhanga that there was room, in the SSF, for an appropriate balance for big industry and small scale operators. The word ‘appropriate’ could hide so many things, but someone had to find a sensible balance. He would, however, like to state his major concern around compliance. The big operators landed in big harbours and it was easy to check that what they caught was actually what they were supposed to be fishing. This was far more difficult with small scale operators and he sympathised with DAFF’s problems, because extending the range of rights holders in the fisheries brought with it a very real need for extra resources on compliance, as there were always flaws in the human condition when no one was looking. The Committee had to be aware of the full implications, and provide DAFF with the appropriate resources to enable adequate compliance. It was no secret that the country had major problems in abalone and rock lobster and unless the DAFF was given adequate resources no one would be the winner. Mr van der Merwe said that he did not agree with Prof. Butterworth over the scientific working groups. He had attended the meetings, and had only seen calculations, but never real counting of the fish. The observers could not vote. The scientists may listen to the SSF contributions, but whether they took them into account was another matter. He hoped that the new Deputy Director General would make it his task to put the scientists in the boats with the SSF. [my emphases]

The discussion entered the final report of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee [see Appendix] in the following point:

· Some groups also advocated for the recognition of indigenous knowledge of traditional fishers and its inclusion in co-management activities. It was reported that DAFF does not involve small-scale fishers


in Scientific Working Groups that conduct stock assessments and determine periodic allocations of total allowable catch and total applied effort.

Which was in turn followed with this recommendation: · DAFF should consider including customary rights in the Amendment Bill and ensure that indigenous knowledge of traditional fishers is considered in its Scientific Working Groups.

What the Small Scale Fishers Policy and, in my view, many of the fishers’ presentations are reaching for to rethink the relationship of knowledge, law, policing, and how that is made. What Prof Butterworth is asking for is to only have to accept objective knowledge that passes the tests of science: an approach that means that whatever does not accord with a particular version of science is not to be accepted. He is asking Parliament to concur with a particular felicity condition that establishes the precedence of scientific nature. In order to equip ourselves to begin to resolve these matters, it is important to study closely the science of the Total Allowable Catch. This is the focus of the next chapter.

S07G07-Green Parliament Small Scale Fishers March 23 2014.pdf

Documents

Transcript of S07G07-Green Parliament Small Scale Fishers March 23 2014.pdf