The PA sees South African marine and aquaculture opportunities along the shoreline as heavily underexploited. These should be transformed into a major boom industry, instituted and developed in environmentally sustainable ways. 

 

Government needs to be the primary investor in such industries in order to create work, secure food supply and increase exports. 

 

Similarly, well-run abalone hatcheries can replenish beds and reefs to revive this highly lucrative industry. 

 

Wholesale training and skills-transfer are needed to make this vision a reality and dedicated training facilities will have to be set up at colleges and universities. A marine university/college will also have to be built and resourced.

 

Once coastal communities have a stake in the success of their locally run industries, whether they be on sea or land, they will have an incentive to steer clear of crime and combat poaching, which impacts on the sustainability and management of valuable state resources.

 

Small-scale fishermen’s access to traditional resources near shore will be reviewed, with the intention of restoring as much of it as possible in a sustainable way.

 

Numerous other opportunities exist, most particularly in tourism (shark-diving and whale watching) and in infrastructure (including restoring and upgrading harbours, seafood-processing facilities and tourist attractions).

 

The PA therefore will support fishing communities through the restructuring of this sector and opening up this industry to these communities. 

 

The PA will adopt a balanced approached by setting up more rigorous assessments for new marine protected areas that will benefit the fishing community. The PA will support and continue to protect marine environments and the fishing communities that rely on them. 

 

The PA seeks to create transformation in the fishing industry with the genuine empowerment of disadvantaged communities to gain a significant stake in the industry. 

 

The quotas for harvesting, both near shore and for deep-sea fishing on a massive scale, will have to be reallocated in order to increasing the share of disadvantaged community members’ ownership of this sector. 

 

Disadvantaged communities must also be given ownership of enterprises that processing marine products and exporting them. For the last decade and a half, the people themselves have said that they want to again have access to the marine resources and the industry around it, which have been monopolised by the big fisheries and the processing and export industries derived from it. 

 

The PA undertakes to remain aware that the sea is not a limitless bounty and the party will respect sustainable practices, informed by science, for how and where quotas should be allocated, but the social and economic devastation caused by post-apartheid legislation regarding access to the sea has had consequences as damaging as the race laws that preceded it. These practices will have to be revisited and transformed. For example, abalone fishing was completely suspended, with the understanding that a social plan would be implemented as a buffer for affected communities, but in this respect government has thus far completely failed. It took away from these affected communities with the one hand and then withheld its promises with the other.