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- A Stuijt
- Retired South African medical journalist, ex-Sunday Times of Johannesburg.
Wild-mussel beds destroyed at rapid rate by hungry South Africans
13:51 | 
Posted by
A Stuijt |
Seaside tribes demand traditional rights to harvest wild mussels amidst growing famine* in SA...
August 2 2008 - Marburg, KZN, South Africa. Nkosinathi Mzobe (26), a local squatter-camp resident, was jailed for a year by the law courts on July 31 when he was caught carrying 650 wild mussels he'd just stripped illegally with a machete from the nearby rocks - wiping out the entire mussel-bed. And once a mussel colony has been destroyed, it's nigh-impossible to replace - even modern mussel-farmers in the Netherlands and Belgium, with years of experience find this a difficult and painstaking process, in which the delicate mussel-seeds first need to be harvested in extremely clean, stable oceanic regions.
The court heard that Mzobe 'didn't have a permit and exceeded the legal daily maximum allowed to be harvested by more than 20 times'.
Wayne Evans, one of the province's (very few remaining) marine-life protection officers, said these fragile mussel-beds are being destroyed at a rapid rate by such ' illegal poachers', who use pangas (machetes) to ruthlessly destroy entire mussel-beds.Mussels need many years just to establish themselves. In the past, tribal women were given the task of carefully hand-picking each individual mussel to assure the survival of their food-resource.
However the SA government has also protected the mussel-beds by very actively discouraging wild-harvesting - with an extensive system of permits and hands-on ocean-side policing of legal wild-mussel harvesters by wild-life conservation officers.
- The traditional mussel-harvesters were allowed to hand-pick only enough for their own daily survival - but nothing more.
However, now that so many millions of people in SA can no longer afford to buy even one daily meal -- according to food-aid agency Operation Hunger, many desperate seaside families now rely on their survival by stripping down the environment for anything edible. Reports are widespread of family pets being consumed, and clans torching the veldt in organising hunts for fleeing rodents.
Tribes battle to harvest wild mussels:These tribal seside communities now are increasingly demanding the right to wild-harvest the mussel beds near their homes as a 'traditional tribal right' .
With the conservation laws still in place, however, a culture of stealth has developed along the entire SA coastline: male tribal harvesters now are rapidly stripping entire mussel beds in the dark, instead of the usual handpicking by the women which would have saved such colonies from permanent extinction.
These tribesmen cook the mussels at once in drums over fires built near the beach. Although tribal women used to be the 'traditional mussel harvesters', a trend has developed where only those men willing to risk being arrested would take part because of the dangers involved.Young men like Mzobe -- each one arrested and sent to jail is always hailed back as a tribal hero -- always work fast, using spades and bush knives (pangas). Catching these stealthy mussel-harvesters is becoming an overwhelming task for the few conservation officers still patrolling the coastlines of South Africa.
- And this is one battle which the South African mussel-beds are destined to lose:
- Millions of South Africans now now stripping the entire countryside of anything edible, and will eat just about anything, including their pets.
http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2368597,00.html - http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?
And once the wild-mussel beds are destroyed, it's also proven to be very problematic to get them back because these tasty sea-creatures are so very fragile, researchers have found.
Creating farmed mussel-beds has always been a major challenge: a ten-year-project to establish new mussel-beds in Flanders, just south of the Dutch border, was scrapped today, reports De Telegraaf newspaper, when a poisonous substance was discovered by the manufacturer's own chemical tests. They immediately withdrew the product from the market and are now re-evaluating their entire process, the Dutch newspaper reports.
http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/1606669/__Belgische_mosselen_maken_ziek__.html
*Growing famine in South Africa:
for details see
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