INNOCENT DWAYI

South Africa’s trawl fishery for hake has been certified as sustainable and well-managed by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) for a fifth consecutive time, extending an unbroken record that began in 2004 when it became the first hake fishery in the world to earn MSC certification.

Over the 22 years since then the fishery has rebuilt stocks, cut seabird interactions with fishing gear, improved bycatch management, deepened scientific understanding of its impact on the seabed, and built a dedicated observer programme that monitors its performance year after year.

It is not an overstatement to say the hake trawling industry — worth about R8.5bn a year and sustaining about 12,400 direct and indirect jobs — has become a genuine international benchmark for what responsible fishing looks like.

The MSC is widely regarded as the gold standard in fishery sustainability certification and for international buyers, and increasingly for the consumers behind them, the MSC ecolabel is the clearest available assurance that the fish on their plate came from a fishery that is genuinely, verifiably sustainable.

It is also key to keeping South African hake producers competitive in international markets. In several valuable export markets — including Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK — MSC certification isn’t simply a competitive edge but a condition of entry. A 2016 study found it opened the door to these northern European markets and calculated that losing it could put up to 1,421 fish processing jobs at risk and shrink the industry’s GDP contribution by close to a third.

It is little wonder the trawling industry’s celebration of a fifth MSC certification is tempered by genuine concern for the scientific foundation that underpins it.

Since 1986 South Africa has conducted a summer and an autumn survey of its hake stocks. These are substantial undertakings: each survey typically consists of 100-120 trawls, most of them between the 100m and 500m depth contours, with some extending beyond 1,000m.

The depth range is important because the trawl fishery depends on two species — shallow-water and deep-water hake — whose depth distributions overlap but are not identical, and whose relative abundance shifts over time and by area. The summer survey covers the west coast, from the Orange River to Cape Agulhas, while the autumn survey assesses the south coast, from Cape Agulhas to Port Alfred.

For most of the past 40 years these bi-annual demersal research surveys have run like clockwork. That is no longer the case. The Africana, the government-owned research vessel that conducts the surveys, is old and over the past decade at least four or five demersal surveys have been postponed or missed entirely because of vessel breakdowns. Since the start of 2025, three surveys have been missed as a direct result of the vessel’s condition.

Modelling by scientists at the University of Cape Town gives a sense of what is at stake if this trend continues. Even in the more benign scenarios, losing the surveys altogether would lower the average catch the management procedure can sustainably support, from about 151,000 tonnes a year to about 148,000 tonnes, while narrowing the range of good years the fishery can benefit from.

However, the more troubling risk is more subtle: commercial catch rates can rise for reasons that have nothing to do with a healthier resource, whether through better gear, sharper skippers or improved technology. Without independent survey data to catch this kind of drift, the modelling shows deep-water hake stocks could decline steadily while the numbers used to set catch limits continue to look reassuring.

That is precisely the blind spot the Africana’s survey record exists to guard against, and this is not a new insight. As far back as 1999 fishery scientists calculated South Africa’s research survey programme for anchovy and sardine returned more than R130m a year in value against an annual running cost of about R1.8m — a small investment protecting a very large one.

The government and the industry have engaged constructively on the Africana’s problems, and there is a strong history of the two working together to solve difficult fisheries challenges. But that history now needs to translate into a decision, because the options on the table are well understood: replace the Africana with a new, purpose-built vessel at an estimated cost of at least R1bn; charter industry-owned vessels for survey work in the interim, despite the costs and disruption that involves; or establish a public–private partnership to operate a research vessel on behalf of the government and industry over the longer term.

Each comes with trade-offs and each deserves serious consideration. What none of them can survive is further delay, which becomes more likely when the department responsible for a decision has experienced three successive changes in ministerial leadership over the past two years, making sustained follow-through on any long-term infrastructure decision harder to achieve, regardless of who occupies the office.

As industry engages with newly appointed minister David Maynier, this is the moment to treat South Africa’s fisheries research capability for what it actually is: a strategic national asset that underpins sustainable resource management, access to premium export markets and thousands of livelihoods along the coast.

Whichever solution the government and industry ultimately choose, it will almost certainly cost less than allowing the survey programme to collapse. South Africa has shown the world it knows how to build and sustain a world-class fishery. The real test now is whether it is willing to protect the data record that made that possible in the first place.