Sustaining both the South African sardine and fishery despite shifting distributions and revised stock structure

The commercial fishery for South African sardine developed in the mid-1940s and operated solely off the west coast of South Africa for almost five decades. However, since the late 1990s there have been substantial shifts in the distribution of sardine biomass together with a revised understanding of the population’s stock structure. These changes have necessitated adjustments to the way in which sardine catch limits are set. Rigid area-based catch limits could have severe consequences for the fishery itself with potential knock-on impacts reverberating from job losses in a country already suffering from high unemployment to a reduction in the provision of canned sardine as a high protein ingredient in underprivileged school feeding schemes. A flexible management procedure has been designed to allow industry to harvest the multiple sardine components sustainably, with area-based restrictions being enforced only under circumstances of extremely low survey estimates of biomass on the west coast or if the spatial distribution of future catches deviate appreciably from that expected to occur naturally.