Christian Adams is a small-scale fisherman living in Steenberg’s Cove, a small fishing village in St Helena Bay on South Africa’s West Coast. He is the chairperson of the Collective of South African Small-Scale Fishers and has been advocating for their rights since 2008.
Small-scale fishers are people who fish and operate on a sustainable level. Unlike subsistence fishers, who fish for consumption or tradition, they sell their catch to make a living, and — unlike commercial fishing companies — their footprint is small and the methods they use to fish are sustainable.
While for years small-scale fishers have been involved in an ongoing struggle to have their fishing allocations increased, the most pressing threat to their livelihoods at present is companies using seismic blasting in search of oil and natural gas off the South African coast.
Seismic blasting is when a seismic ship fires an air gun at the ocean bed and uses the reverberations to build a map of the ground below it. The fishers — and scientists that work with them — claim that the seismic blasts interfere with marine life. The other concern is that if oil or natural gas is found, drilling companies would move in.
In 2021, Shell obtained permission to do seismic blasting for oil and gas on the country’s East Coast. Fishers around the country, along with the public, protested to have Shell stopped. The battle went to the courts, which then ruled against Shell.
However, in the same year, Searcher Geodata UK Limited and Searcher Seismic Australia (known more commonly as Searcher) still obtained permission to do seismic blasting for oil and natural gas all along South Africa’s western coast.
Adams and other applicants approached the courts to urgently interdict Searcher from performing seismic blasting on South Africa’s West Coast, with the argument that Searcher had not complied with regulations regarding the consultation of key stakeholders as the fishers were not consulted at all.
The success of the case hinged on the movement of snoek, one of the species of fish the fishers rely on for their livelihoods. The fishers were able to produce data which showed how far they go in order to catch snoek, as well as data on how far the snoek travels, ultimately proving that they were an affected party and should therefore have been consulted.
The application for the interdict was successful, and Searcher was stopped.
At a recent strategic planning workshop on how to deal with the oil and gas threat, it was agreed that while both Searcher and Shell were stopped from performing seismic blasting through the courts, it wouldn’t be possible to keep them at bay in the long run.
Fishers from around the country united in protest and were joined by the public in the fight against Shell and Searcher. They now believe that if they are to stop seismic blasting for oil and natural gas permanently, they will have to step up their work in movement building and garner more public support for their cause.
The issue continues to make headlines in South Africa as, just this past September, a South African High Court ruled that the permission originally granted to Shell for seismic blasting was granted unlawfully.
But it’s activists like Adams that will continue to make waves overall. Here, he shares with Global Citizen how he became an activist fighting for the preservation of the marine ecosystem that feeds him and his community.