Samba Diallo, a fisherman in Nouakchott, Mauritania, says he must travel farther and farther from shore on his traditional wooden boat, and he still catches only half as many fish as he did before the arrival of the huge factory-style fishing trawlers from Asia and Russia.Erin Conway-Smith/The Globe and Mail
In a small wooden boat named after his grandfather, Samba Diallo ventures out into the Atlantic Ocean to fish, as he has done for decades.
It was once a simple life: rise at dawn, go out to sea for a few hours, bring home his catch. But these days he needs four shipmates to help him survive. They stay out in the deep ocean for days at a time, nearly 40 kilometres off the West African coast, sleeping in shifts and watching anxiously for the giant Asian and Russian supertrawlers that could capsize their small pirogue in the blink of an eye.
The foreign trawlers, with huge bottom-dragging nets that scoop up every living thing, have engaged in so much illegal overfishing that they threaten the livelihoods of thousands of West African fishermen. A recent study by the Africa Progress Panel, headed by former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan, estimates that illegal and unregulated fishing is costing West Africa at least $1.3-billion (U.S.) a year.
The big industrial trawlers have made the lives of African fishermen more arduous – and more dangerous. "We have to go farther and farther to find fish, and we only catch half of what we caught before," says Mr. Diallo, a 42-year-old Senegalese migrant who has been fishing off the coast of Mauritania since 1989.
West Africa's long coast, one of the world's richest and most abundant ocean fishing grounds, has increasingly attracted the attention of factory trawlers from China, Russia, South Korea and Europe, often heavily subsidized by their own governments. "Rising global demand for fish, especially in emerging markets, and conservation measures in other regions, have made African waters a magnet for fleets from around the world," the Africa Progress Panel says.
A single big trawler can catch 250 tonnes of fish in a day – the same amount of fish that 50 pirogues would catch in a year. African fishermen have been shocked at the methods of the trawlers. "I never thought you could take so many fish in one net – many different types of fish, even octopus," Mr. Diallo said.
"They don't take only what they need – they also take other fish that they don't need, but we need. They're so aggressive. They're extinguishing the fisheries with their methods. The government should control them, but everyone knows they don't."
The trawlers exploit the corruption and lax regulation of West African governments to obtain illegal permits and under-report their catch, using fraud to dodge their legal limits. A study this year by Greenpeace found that the China National Fisheries Corp. had under-declared the size of 44 of its 59 vessels that were operating off the coasts of Senegal, Guinea and Guinea Bissau. This was equivalent to adding 22 trawlers to the fishing grounds. Similar practices are happening in other West African countries, too, it said.
Chinese companies have dramatically expanded their fishing operations in Africa, from 13 vessels to 462 vessels over the past 30 years, Greenpeace said. Their use of fraud to evade the limits "has allowed these companies to plunder African marine resources at low cost and with quasi-impunity," the environmental group said.
"These companies not only deprive the coastal states of financial income but undermine any hope for sustainable and equitable management of fisheries, an extremely worrisome situation."
Research by scientists at the University of British Columbia has found similar evidence that Chinese fleets are systematically under-reporting their West African fishing catches. Analysts from the UN and the Africa Progress Panel have estimated that up to half of the fishing catch in West Africa is illegal, unregulated or under-reported.
This is a devastating loss in a region where fishing provides up to a quarter of all jobs and two-thirds of all animal protein in human diets. In Senegal alone, about 600,000 people are directly or indirectly employed in the fishing sector, including 52,000 fishers.
"The livelihoods of artisanal fishing people are being destroyed, Africa is losing a vital source of protein and nutrition, and opportunities to enter high value-added areas of world trade are being lost," the Africa Progress Panel said in its report.
Many African countries have only a few speed boats and a few dozen officials to monitor the vast commercial fishing fleets. "In practice, few African governments are able to monitor or enforce the terms of these agreements [with foreign trawlers]; most lack the capacity to effectively patrol their coastal waters," the panel said. "Leaders and business interests have actively colluded in, and benefited from, the illegal sale of permits to foreign fleets."
When he began fishing as a teenager, Mr. Diallo would travel only 10 or 15 kilometres out to sea, returning home the same day. But now he must journey 36 km, competing in the same fishing grounds as the giant trawlers, where collisions are frequent. The pirogues – small motorized canoes, built from local timber – are required to carry red warning lights to make them visible at night, but the trawlers often still cannot see or hear them.
"We've had accidents where we crash into them," Mr. Diallo said. "The biggest and most dangerous are the Chinese boats. Even if you can swim, you're dead, because the Chinese don't see you in the water."
To reduce the collisions, the Mauritanian government is planning to prohibit the artisanal fishing boats from travelling more than nine kilometres from the coast. The new restrictions might make the fishers safer, but Mr. Diallo says the limit would make it impossible to earn a living from fishing. Only the big trawlers would have access to the richest fishing waters.
"It's absurd, it's terrible," he said when he learned of the new law. "It's like they're telling us not to work any more."
Geoffrey York