At Kalk Bay harbour on Heritage Day I was sitting and taking in the view when one of the young men working for the fish dealer came over and asked: “Don’t you want to buy some smoked snoek?”
“No thanks,” I said.
But he was not giving up that easily.
“No, this is very special smoked snoek,” he said. On his days off, he explained, they take a big blue tarpaulin – “that one over there” – and go to a sheltered spot on the harbour. They all light up their dagga pipes, make sure the fish is properly covered, and that, apparently, is how they make smoked snoek.
“It’s very delicious,” he assured me. “And organic.”
It was a joke, of course, but it also said something about the harbour. A young man like that is mostly idle because there is not much fish coming through the harbour anymore. On that day, only two boats went out fishing.
I asked about the snoek being sold there and was told it came from Yzerfontein, many kilometres away. They were also selling snoek roe, and that too came from snoek landed elsewhere. That is the point. What we see at the harbour is not always what the harbour itself produces.
The same pattern applies in fishing and farming. The fisherman often gets the worst of the deal, receiving a low price for his catch. So does the farmer, who may nurse a crop for months only to sell it at a basic average price, provided the season has not been ruined by drought, frost or some other disaster. The real value is often created later in the chain — in processing, packaging, cooking and retailing.
In economic terms, that is called beneficiation, or upstream value adding. It simply means adding value after the raw product has been produced. So the fisherman gets very little, while the fish shop, the restaurant, or the food manufacturer may do much better.
That was certainly visible at Kalk Bay on Heritage Day, where the queues outside the restaurants were long. The harbour remains a tourist attraction, but the restaurants are not necessarily dependent on the catch coming in from the local boats. They can source fish from the larger fishing companies, from ski-boat operators elsewhere, and from other supply channels entirely. Calamari is a good example. Very little, if any, is actually landed at the harbour itself. It often comes from elsewhere, including imported supply chains. It comes mainly from China and Patagonia.
In farming there is a similar situation where the farmer raises a crop over several months and then sells it to a cooperative or buyer at an ordinary price. The big food companies then use those crops as ingredients in manufactured products. The farmer carries the weather risk, the pest risk and the price risk, while the processor and retailer often capture more of the final value.
That does not mean the middle of the chain is risk-free. Restaurant owners, fish shop owners and food manufacturers all risk capital. They buy equipment, lease premises, pay wages and carry overheads. Those costs have to be covered, and the capital outlay has to be rewarded. But the imbalance remains: the people closest to the raw product are often the least rewarded.
The joke about dagga-smoked snoek may have been tongue-in-cheek, but it also reflected something harder. Fishing is a tough life, and for many it has become a meagre one. In the old days there were women who fished those boats too. Nowadays, the work is harsher, the returns are thinner, and some crew members live in damp boat hulls through winter. For a few, marijuana may be a salve against hardship — much as others turn to whisky or brandy. But no amount of humour changes the underlying fact: the fisherman and the farmer feed everyone, yet too often keep the least.
