The officers’ explanation might seem surprising to an outsider. High security arrangements are not usually associated with molluscs. But for coastal towns across South Africa, abalone have become a source of both prosperity and disorder, creating jobs for thousands while also cultivating international organised crime syndicates.

Under threat is not only the safety of the African communities riddled with gangsterism, but the health of those thousands of miles away who consume unregulated catches.

South Africa exports more than 5,000 tonnes (5,500 tons) of abalone annually, mainly to Hong Kong and other Asian markets, where it is referred to as “white gold”. Of that amount nearly half is poached, according to estimates by wildlife trafficking organisations and government agencies.

The impact is glaring. Haliotis midae – its scientific name – or perlemoen, as locals in South Africa call it, is listed as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.

The wild abalone population is “highly depleted” and the volume being illegally harvested is unsustainable.

“Projections indicate that without an appreciable reduction in catches, whether legal or illegal, the abalone resource will collapse within 10 years,” says Albi Modise, head of communications for South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs.

The stakes are high. South Africa’s illicit trade is valued at between US$60 million and US$120 million annually, according to wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic.

Despite its 2,850km (1,770 mile) coastline, South Africa does not have a coastguard service. The navy, boasting a fleet of warships and submarines, is not tasked with protecting the coast within 100 metres (330ft) of the shore. Instead, it is designed to combat piracy and foreign threats.

This means the task of combating poaching among the sparsely arranged coastal towns falls to the national police. The force had 136 active divers and 82 vessel handlers as of last year, but these are also responsible for recovering drowning victims and the prevention of other crimes.

Police take abalone poaching seriously, conducting an estimated 350 to 400 seizures each year, says Markus Burgener, a senior programme officer with Traffic. In 2019 alone, police reported seizures exceeding US$1.6 million in value, but that remains a fraction of the total activity.

That same year, police reported that two Chinese nationals were convicted for receiving, selling and transporting illicit abalone. They agreed to be deported as part of their sentencing deal.

Still, police are losing the battle against poachers and as the abalone market has grown – with exports rising an average eight per cent per annum from 2009 to 2016 – it has become a mainstay of the coastal economy, making it ever harder to dismantle illegal trade.

South Africa offers a foundation on which international crime syndicates can thrive. Unemployment is rampant, particularly among the young. Last year, jobless rates exceeded 32 per cent, with people aged 15 to 24 experiencing rates of more than 59 per cent.

“The syndicates have taken advantage of the situation where they’ve seen an opportunity that there are plenty of people, an endless supply of South Africans, who are prepared to poach,” says Burgener.

“It doesn’t matter how many people get arrested and put in jail – there are always going to be more people willing to do this because, relatively, the risk is low, and the rewards are quite high.”

The country has also seen its law enforcement and national security structures weakened under widespread corruption.

A judicial inquiry into state graft that released its findings last year found top intelligence officials at the State Security Agency were colluding with and shielding corrupt politicians and using covert intelligence projects to siphon public funds.

The national police service is also in a state of disarray. Nearly 6,000 members, including 972 detectives, left the force in the year ending March 31, 2022, amid rising crime. Over 5,200 police misconduct cases were filed that same year, potentially adding to the more than 13,000 outstanding civil court cases against the force.

Those existing cases alone might see up to US$3.8 billion paid out in compensation, further depleting resources.

“There is growing evidence that the Western Cape police service may have been infiltrated by some gang leaders,” says Andricus Van Der Westhuizen, a lawmaker for the Western Cape, a province on South Africa’s southwest coast.

Spokespeople for the South African Police Service acknowledged but did not provide a response to multiple requests for comment.

The close personal ties individual officers have with the communities they serve can lead them to turn a blind eye to the abalone poaching. “They may have friends or families who are somehow involved, and even if they’re not being bribed, they’re somehow benefiting,” says Burgener.

Having described watching trucks pull up to the shore and drop off men who run into the water, clearly equipped for harvesting abalone, one resident says: “You can’t phone anybody because nobody responds.”

Even for clean cops, hunting abalone poachers may not be a priority in a country where the average murder rate is more than 70 per day. Comparatively, abalone poaching is seen as a “soft crime”, says Burgener.

The country’s environment ministry also noted that “limited resources” are among the challenges for a police force that is spread thin.

Despite the ubiquity of the trade, catching poachers is no easy task. The ragged edge of the country’s rocky coast is dotted with countless hidden alcoves that are impossible to monitor from winding highways above.

In remote towns framed by imposing mountains that roll into white-sand beaches and turquoise water, locals can all point out hotspots where they have seen suspicious activity, places bearing names such as Danger Point, Pringle Bay, Betty’s Bay and Hermanus.

Not all of these places are easily accessible, with fenced-off private land or set in rough terrain with no roads. Not even in Perlemoen Bay, named after the mollusc, can any fishermen be seen, let alone poachers.

In Hermanus, which attracts tourists for its whale watching, one restaurant manager says he has seen poachers out several times before dusk. But another refutes this claim, saying the town is too busy with regular foot traffic to be an ideal spot for those involved in the activity, who prefer places that are out of sight.

A park ranger says many poachers gather at a taxi rank in the nearby town of Kleinmond, next to a sea of metal shacks, a common sight around the country. But on two trips to the site, no one is to be found, not even taxis.

A woman collecting water from a nearby pipe to wash clothes by hand says she knows nothing of fishermen gathering there. Many others are reluctant to discuss the topic due to the criminality of the trade.

“If you whistle-blow, you lose your life,” says the 40-year-old restaurant manager, who claims to have seen poachers in Hermanus several times. He has never reported what he witnessed to police.

If poachers are caught and arrested, he explains, he would have to testify against them, exposing himself to a wider criminal network that could “take you out” in revenge. “The risk is not worth it,” he says.

The illegal trade poses security concerns for the legal farms as well.

HIK Abalone Farm is among the major producers in South Africa. Based in Hermanus, it turns out 400 tonnes per year. Farm manager Matthew Naylor says that their cargo trucks have faced attempted hijackings and shootings.

“It’s only a matter of time, as the wild stock gets less and less, we or our trucks may become more of a target,” he says. “So it’s a little bit scary.”

This has meant the company spending more on security, with a 24-hour presence at their sites, including cameras and detailed logging of all comings and goings.

It avoids sending out trucks at night and varies the routes they take to make them harder to target. There are also deliberate breaks in communication with staff, to prevent information about shipments falling into the wrong hands.

“It’s not a normal thing to do in business,” Naylor says, “where not everyone knows what’s going on what day and in which truck and who the driver is. And the whole industry is facing this. Everyone has had to up their security.”

The illicit market also poses a reputational threat to the global trade. Food safety is a big concern for legal producers, who employ meticulous processes to clean abalone that is then dried, canned, or shipped live.

At one of Abagold’s farms – another major producer in Hermanus – seawater pumped in to fill the hundreds of tanks is treated to remove any contaminants. The growing abalone are fed a special formula, what looks like sand for those in the hatchery, and later pellets like dog food along with kelp from the sea. Each Abagold farm uses up to six tonnes of kelp per week.

For those entering Abagold’s processing plant the wearing of hair nets and lab coats is required, along with removal of jewellery and thorough handwashing.

The abalone is removed from its shell by hand, machine-washed and then taken along a conveyor belt where employees scrub the mollusc by hand. Canned abalone is pre-cooked for up to 24 minutes, depending on its size.

From shell to can, the process takes 24 hours, says Abagold production manager Michael Dunsdon. Once cleaned, the dried abalone hangs for three weeks in a room that feels like a sauna.

Poached abalone do not receive the same care. There are no hygienic processing plants and cold chain distribution, but rather sacks hidden in bushes, open-air pickup trucks and poachers’ backyards. The risk to public health is obvious.

For aquaculturists, the reputational damage of a disease outbreak linked to South African abalone would be disastrous.

“One of the industry’s and one of my biggest fears is that someone in Hong Kong gets sick from the illegal abalone and our entire legal industry suffers because of it,” says Abagold’s marketing manager Werner Piek.

Efforts are being made to better inform consumers in order to cut off demand for poached abalone. Most farms in South Africa have some sort of sustainability certification, which they promote on their labels. Abagold’s products bear a Friend of the Sea emblem while HIK is certified by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.

Public education on the differences between legal and illegal abalone is making a difference, Piek says. More hotel, restaurant and supermarket groups are asking for certification, which can help drive out illegal products that lack the necessary paperwork.

The conservation organisation is also advocating for the Hong Kong government to improve seafood labelling in order to give consumers more information about the origin of what they are eating, says Loby Hau Cheuk-yu, assistant manager of oceans sustainability at WWF-Hong Kong.

Consumers appear to be embracing the idea, with more than half in recent surveys conducted by WWF-Hong Kong saying that they would opt for products with sustainable seafood labelling. “We are slowly driving the movement,” he says.

But it’s not easy for consumers to be sure of a product’s origin when it has passed through several layers of distribution.

One obvious difference is the price – legal abalone is a good deal more expensive, given the costs incurred to ensure its quality. This means that price-conscious consumers still tend to opt for the cheaper, illegal variety, exposing them to health risks.

“There’s still a lot to be done in Hong Kong and in China to make people more aware,” says Piek.

Poaching’s impact on the ecosystem is visible to those living on the coast. Kim Maclean, a pioneer in shark cage diving who has lived and worked on the Western Cape her whole life, has witnessed these changes.

Growing up, she says you could easily dive near the shore and pick up a few abalone for the family, like they would with crayfish or other seafood.

“In those days, we called them hubcaps,” Maclean says. “They were literally like hubcaps of cars. You don’t get that any more.”

Abalone can still be found, but they are smaller and further from the coastline, she says. Because of the protections in place to thwart poaching, including a ban on recreational fishing of the molluscs introduced in 2003, divers such as Maclean can no longer catch abalone for personal consumption.

Meanwhile, the canned variety is hard to find and too expensive for the average consumer.

The Perlemoen Abalone and Wine Restaurant, nestled in a Hermanus cove overlooking the ocean, is one of the rare spots where South Africans can now eat the delicacy indigenous to their waters.

Owner Jannie Malherbe, who grew up eating abalone until the fishing bans were imposed, sources his live abalone from HIK.

“It’s great that we could bring it back,” Malherbe says. “When we opened, we thought we’d do seafood and also sell some abalone, but now we literally don’t have a table that doesn’t eat abalone.”

Given the immense pressure on the species, it has defied the odds. “In the 1990s, we expected it would be wiped out but it has shown it is quite resilient,” says Peter Britz, a professor of ichthyology and fisheries science at Rhodes University.

While the government has made a 10-year estimate for what Britz calls an “inevitable” collapse, he adds that the timeline is uncertain because of a lack of recent surveys of the population.

Wider ecological impact is minimal. Abalone are not a keystone species that other animals depend on. “They’re almost immune to predation because they have this very large shell,” Britz explains. While some octopus eat them, they are not reliant on them as a food source.

The abalone themselves feed on kelp and while the kelp forests around the coast appear to be thickening, according to Maclean, Britz says there is no scientific evidence to suggest a significant change in kelp density.

The disappearance of abalone, even if relatively inconsequential to the environment, would add to the lengthy list of extinctions due to human activity. “It’s in no way desirable to reduce the biomass of a species and reduce biodiversity,” Britz points out.

A collapse could lead poachers to turn to other seafood products, destabilising other species, says HIK’s Naylor. He is not alone in thinking this. “The crime syndicates will definitely not disappear. They will move on to the next product, the next item,” says Abagold’s Piek.

That is because the poaching network is not only about trafficking abalone. Crime syndicates moving the molluscs out of South Africa pay their suppliers in drugs rather than cash because it’s cheaper for them to do so, Traffic’s Burgener says. The recipients of the drugs resell them in order to make higher profits.

Drug abuse is pervasive in the Western Cape. The number of drug-related crime incidents it records is at least tenfold that of other provinces. This has far-reaching implications. “Drugs are fed to youngsters as payment. That down the line affects the community, it brings in crime. It causes major accidents, you’ve continually got car chases. People die,” Maclean says.

But bringing a hard stop to the illicit trade would have socioeconomic ramifications. “If we were super successful in stopping the poaching then effectively, what we would do is close down a big business. And so we put a whole lot of people out of work,” Burgener says.

When poaching is down due to bad weather or other factors, people living in these communities see break-ins and other petty crimes rise, Naylor says.

Provincial officials, who have limited authority in responding to the issue, which falls under national jurisdiction for both policing and policy, say they hear these concerns from communities. “We’re receiving the complaints of people who have property along the shore and feel threatened by this kind of illegal activity,” says lawmaker Van Der Westhuizen.

Given the intertwined nature of illegal wildlife trade and other crimes such as drug trafficking, both Traffic and WWF-Hong Kong say a new approach of following the money and cracking down on kingpins at the top is being taken.

“If you want to stop these syndicates, try and find out how they’re moving their money and stop that – seize assets, close bank accounts,” Burgener says. “These are often more effective ways than trying to stop consignments of illegal goods being moved.”

The networks are not easy to unravel and police often face jurisdictional challenges. If an illegal haul of abalone makes its way into Zimbabwe, authorities there don’t have the grounds to stop it from being transported to Hong Kong because abalone is not an illegal product, Burgener says.

South African abalone was listed on CITES – the regulatory Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora – in 2007 but was removed three years later and remains absent from the list.

Re-listing the species would give other countries a legal mechanism by which to stop and seize shipments. But it would also create logistical challenges for the legal producers, requiring more paperwork that could slow down trade, particularly live shipments.

“The farms will jump through the hoops but if it’s listed on CITES it makes it a hell of a lot more difficult,” Naylor says.

Rigorous health certifications and cold chain require­ments have made it near impossible for poached abalone to be imported live or canned, Piek says. But dried abalone is not as scrutinised, which is why the illicit variety has sailed through the ports of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou since the late 1990s.

“To the trader or shipping companies, when they get a manifest that mentions the shipment is abalone, they don’t recognise that perhaps it’s illegal from the provenance, from South Africa,” says Jovy Chan Yuet-shan, manager for wildlife conservation at WWF-Hong Kong.

Once in the market, the illegal and legal dried abalone are mixed, making it harder to distinguish them apart.

The size of the illicit market is evidence of the scale of opportunity for legal production. But establishing an abalone farm requires a massive investment of both time and money. Abalone need at least three years to grow to an acceptable size for consumption and seven years to reach sexual maturity in order to spawn.

The government’s legal minimum catch size for permitted fishers of 11.4cm (4.5 inches) means abalone are caught at eight or nine years of age – allowing them time to reproduce. Untouched, they can live for an estimated 30 years.

Legal fishers are small fry when it comes to harvesting wild abalone. Fewer than 300 individuals and companies are permitted to catch abalone and that number has remained unchanged since 2015, according to the environment ministry.

Each fisher was allowed to harvest less than 100 tonnes of abalone in 2019 – which the department then said accounted for a total of just five per cent of what was cleared from the ocean floor.

Aquaculture farms such as HIK and Abagold can help re-seed the ocean. Pilot projects in the Eastern Cape, another province where poaching is a problem, have used farmed abalone to replenish areas and spawn new generations.

Properly regulated, these abalone can be harvested five times per year “providing gainful employment to fishermen in these communities and also driving out any illegal poaching activity”, Britz says.

This model could be replicated across the country. “The bottom line is governance. If the government has the right policies to ranch, it is possible,” Britz says. Instead, the very policies in place to outlaw abalone catching in order to protect the species are hindering these efforts.

Quotas are too low to be attractive for even small-scale fishers, he says, so no one wants to invest in wild ranching.

It is a potential solution that stakeholders are increasingly discussing. If the rights to the coastline and abalone could be given to local communities, who would then have the incentive to protect and allow the mollusc to grow to more desirable sizes, it could be a win-win for everyone, Van Der Westhuizen says.

“We just need to start thinking laterally and come up with alternative plans to see if we can a) create huge employment opportunities and b) legalise abalone,” he says.

The environmental affairs department told Post Magazine that several areas have been identified for potential ranching projects but did not specify any measures to actually implement the practice, which means poachers will continue to scour the seas at night, risking not just arrest but drowning, in order to put cheap abalone on the plates of diners on the other side of the globe.

“In Asia, in Hong Kong, there is a big variety of seafood and in the supermarkets, the wet markets, some of them are not even tagged,” says WWF-Hong Kong’s Hau. “So this is a practical problem for mainstreaming sustainable seafood.

“We are trying to push or to convince the government to work on the seafood labelling policy to at least track the species, its origin and harvesting method.”

For now though, consumers are left with the responsibility of figuring out if they are supporting the illicit trade with limited information. But, as Abagold’s Piek says, “an educated consumer asking the right questions will be able to identify where the abalone is coming from.”