TURNING the tide

Seafood with a story has landed in South Africa. Walk into one of nearly 150 Cape restaurants that serve responsibly caught fish from Abalobi, and along with the freshest fish you’ve ever eaten (unless you’re an angler, of course), you get a human story, captured in a QR code and shared by your server. The code connects the fish on your plate to the fisher who caught it. It contains information about its species, and tells you where and how it was caught.

Abalobi’s story begins with the collaboration of traditional fishers with its founder and managing director, Dr Serge Raemaekers. The fisheries scientist-turned-social entrepreneur grew up in urban Europe; but from an early age, he was fascinated by oceans: by the age of 10, he could recite all dolphins by their Latin species names. It wasn’t surprising that he studied fisheries management, but his life took a turn when, in 2004, he came to South Africa.

While conducting a stock assessment of abalone on the Wild Coast for his PhD, Serge had the opportunity to engage with local small-scale fishermen and -women and, for the first time, realised how much deep, local ecological knowledge they had of fish species, the ocean and climate – knowledge very often overlooked by fisheries’ regulators. If shared, this data could