Fresh Water Fishery. Pushing For Change

Responsibility for the management of South Africa’s fresh water fishery has been dealt with at provincial level under old pre-1994 provincial nature conservation laws.

This situation persists to this day. This despite fisheries being an exclusively national competence and the 1998 introduction of the framework National Environmental Management Act (‘NEMA”).

Not having a fisheries policy and unscientific ideas that species that are indigenous are preferable to those introduced by man and are alien and have influenced conservationist thinking in South Africa. This has made it extraordinarily difficult to implement NEMBA effectively in the fresh water space.

The result is that fresh water environmental and fisheries management remain a relic from a bygone age.