The Political Economy of Competition, Regulation and Transformation: Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) and Quota Allocations in South African Industrial Fisheries

Power asymmetries in value chains mean that inequalities in returns, access to key resources and share of value added are reinforced and skewed against smaller players. Policies put in place to enforce market rules and ensure fairness can be ineffective in the context of entrenched market power, lack of competition, and high levels of control by lead firms over key resources and rights – necessitating different rules of the game to change the inequalities. Under these circumstances, transformation and economic participation of marginalized groups are unlikely to be achieved, with important socio-economic and political implications. South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies and competition laws target economic redress and inclusion of historically disadvantaged people in the ownership and control of economic activity and productive assets. BEE criteria have been embedded in a number of industry empowerment charters, a Broad-Based BEE Act and a series of codes of implementation. South Africa’s competition law is well-established and effectively implemented. Yet, the impacts of these instruments have been frustratingly limited and slow, especially in sectors where a few companies dominate.
The paper draws on secondary sources and in-depth interviews with industry players in the South African Hake Deep Sea Trawl (HDST) fishery to examine the interactions between industrial fishery quota allocations by the government, BEE policy, and competition dynamics as they impact on allocation of finite access to national resource endowments. It shows that, even in one of the most regulated sectors of South Africa’s economy, large incumbents maintain a disproportionate amount of bargaining power vis-à-vis smaller players in HDST fishery, both upstream and downstream, and throughout the domestic and global value chains. We conclude that as long as rules protect incumbency, inequality will be sustained. Even where scale economies are at play, quota allocation, transformation and competition regulation should go hand in hand to facilitate the effective participation of black-owned businesses as competitors in the hake value chain.