More in the breach than observance: crayfish, conservation & capitalism c.1890-c.1939
Date
1992-08-26
Authors
Van Sittert, Lance
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Abstract
An emerging environmental history in South Africa has so far focused exclusively
on terrestrial environments and their human-resource interactions (land, game,
forests) (1). In so doing it has also been heavily influenced by the revisionist and
social history of the past two decades and careful to locate environmental issues
in the broader social, economic and political context-of an emerging capitalism in
Southern Africa. No attempt has yet been made, however, to extend the scope of
this endeavour to encompass the marine resource and recent environmental
literature on the subject still evidences a strong present-mindedness which
strongly detracts from its analysis (2). The marine environment is innately hostile
to capitalism, except in its petty or merchant forms, by virtue of its common
property status and susceptibility to a range of "natural factors" which disrupt
production (3). For productive capitalism to succeed in such a hostile environment,
it needs to be able to limit the effects of both these factors on accumulation in
order to justify investment. In South Africa this was achieved after 1945 through
large-scale central state intervention, assuming ownership of the resource and
conferring de facto private property rights on private exploiters and lessening
the effect of "natural factors" on production through the provision of
infrastructure and marine research (4). Prior to this, capital's successful
exploitation of the marine resource was fundamentally dependent on untrammelled
access, relying on the sure abundance of the latter to compensate for the
detractions of non-ownership and the vagaries of weather and resource. These
constraints also made marine resources a low development priority alongside mining
and agriculture and saw them relegated to the realm of the regional maritime state
which was too weak exercise effective ownership, confer ownership rights on
capital or mediate the effects of natural factors on production. The Cape colonial
etate concentrated its efforts on developing deep sea trawling, but after 1910 the
provincial state confined itself to the "preservation" of fish and game.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 26 October 1992
Keywords
Crayfish industry. Economic aspects. South Africa. History. Congresses, Marine resources conservation. South Africa. History. Congresses, Capitalism. South Africa. History. Congresses