SA snails find a niche in Europe market

RAY SMUTS IT SOUNDS rather like carrying coals to Newcastle but a Western Cape entrepreneur has come up with what is possibly the newest, and certainly the first such, addition to South Africa’s export basket – snails for the European table. Loathed by some, loved by others, two million of these slow-moving gastropod molluscs were exported last year, harvested from farmlands in the Grabouw area. Since a French snail expert identified the potential of Cape snails a few years back, a small black empowerment business, Elezane Industries, got down to it, becoming the first company to export live snails by sea and air. The snails are collected early in the morning from beneath trees in fruit orchards, crated and transported to Hermanus. Once there, they are fanned by blowers until they apparently start imagining summer has come and start hibernating, after which they are shipped to Europe – still in sleeping mode. Harvesting snails not only provides farmers with an environmentally-friendly way of combating pests but provides at least 100 seasonal job opportunities in Grabouw alone. Snails are collected from as far afield as the Langkloof which produced one ton of the little creatures in just a week during December. Franschhoek is also said to be teeming with them.