Tim Butcher

How shellfish is that?

Tim Butcher says that abalone poachers are bringing terror to sleepy seaside towns in South Africa

Hermanus

You can forget car-jacking, mugging and necklacing. In South Africa the worst crime problem centres on an oddly shaped bottom-dweller.

Known locally as perlemoen but elsewhere as abalone, the seawater shellfish has sparked a poaching and smuggling racket that is outgrowing all other crime in a country widely held to be the world’s most criminal. Poachers have been drowned by rivals, gun battles have erupted in supposedly sleepy seaside resorts, and customs officials have been bribed on an industrial scale. And the whole thing is being choreographed by Chinese triads.

The situation is so critical that a joint police, coastguard and army task-force has been set up under Operation Neptune to deal with the crisis. And a special abalone court has been convened near Cape Town to try nothing but cases connected with the shellfish. There are already enough outstanding cases to keep the court going for three years.

The problem for South Africa is that its abalone is not just the common-or-garden ‘pink abalone’ that is farmed by the ton in California and elsewhere. Off Africa’s southern tip the wild abalone is of an altogether more upmarket quality. It is ‘beige abalone’ or Haliotis midae, to be more Linnaean, and for the world’s great consumers of abalone this makes a world of difference – a difference for which they are willing to pay.

The abalone-eating capital of the world just happens to be in Asia, and when Asian connoisseurs get interested in a delicacy the sums of money involved soon make criminals pay attention. The vast prices commanded by the scarce ‘beige abalone’, and its supposed aphrodisiac qualities, by gastronomes in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have led triads to set up a criminal web stretching halfway round the world.

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