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Factors such as the influx of foreign trawlers into West African waters, unbalanced fisheries agreements with foreign governments, and weak and poor enforcement have driven migration to the region (Image: Aliu Embalo/China Dialogue Ocean)
Kebba Jeffang
November 9, 2023November 9, 2023
Fish is critical to nutrition and livelihoods in West Africa, where an estimated 5. 5 million tonnes were trapped in the region’s waters in 2019. Nearly another 7 million people in West Africa depend directly on fisheries-related activities for food or work, according to a 2015 study.
But a number of dots are depleting fish stocks, causing economic hardship and thus fuelling abnormal migration to Europe. These are accompanied by an influx of foreign fishing vessels into the region’s waters, unbalanced fishing agreements with foreign governments, weak laws, and poor law enforcement.
Experts say these disorders can be overcome. They call on West African countries to: work together as a bloc to ensure that they can conclude fairer fisheries agreements; investing in control and surveillance to deter illegal fishing; and put in place policies that better protect the marine ecosystem on which fish stocks depend.
Between 2017 and 2023, more than 900,000 migrants arrived irregularly in Europe via sea and land: Italy, Spain, Greece, Malta and Cyprus, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM). An estimated 26 percent of them were from West and Central Africa.
The adventure is dangerous. Many of those who have left are unable to make it in Europe and are forced to return home. Others die.
Between January and March this year, 532 more people went missing while trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, the IOM report notes, with the disappearances largely due to drowning, dehydration or hypothermia.
In 2021, Nuha Njie tried to leave Gunjur, a coastal town in The Gambia, on a fishing boat bound for Morocco, from where he hoped to get to Europe. He is now back in Gunjur selling fish.
“Before my failed trip, I asked for a rental shop near the landing site to sell fish,” he told China Dialogue. “I had a hard time getting one. ” Njie explains that such a facility would have created employment opportunities for other young people, such as fish vendors or suppliers. Njie adds, “I’m not aware of any government loans or assistance for fishing equipment, such as boats, that would have encouraged us to stay here and work. “
The disorders persist. Industrial trawlers rarely damage or destroy fishing nets placed in the waters by local fishermen, Njie says. Although occasionally accidental, this damage “affects catches, and as a result, the market has a shortage of [fish] stocks. “Clashes between artisanal fishermen and commercial trawlers.
Njie extra accuses trawlers of violating the rules by fishing during a six-month “closed period” in winter, set by the government to allow fish to reproduce. He explains that Chinese fishmeal factories, supplied via Senegalese ships, rarely operate during this period. “It’s unfortunate that the government of The Gambia is not enforcing the season shutdown as it should. “
The Gambia’s fishing rules, last updated in 2008, stipulate that no trawler may fish within 12 nautical miles of the coast. However, unlike those in Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, they do not imply what fine will be imposed for specific cases. Crimes. Often, this translates into minimal consequences for fishermen, or even a loophole through bribing officials.
Despite Senegal’s regulations, Siaka Fai, a fisherman from the village of Missira in the northern Fatick region, says fishing agreements – and the ensuing commercial trawlers – are compromising marine resources. “Our government has signed those fishing agreements and has granted licenses to other trawlers to operate in our waters. . . They have the highest capacity, and we even compete with them in the spaces we can access,” says Fai. “As a result, small-scale fishers [would return] with minimal catches, which is frustrating. “
Illegal fishing has led to the loss of more than 300,000 jobs in small-scale (or classical) fisheries in West Africa, according to the International Collective in Support of Fish Workers (ICSF). As a result, those other people are forced to locate cadres in the sector or look for cadres abroad.
The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated situations conducive to abnormal migration. A UN report on extreme poverty in West Africa, published in January 2022, shows that “nearly 25 million people are unable to meet their basic food needs, up 34% from 2020. “
There is an old precedent for this. In 2005 and 2006, fish stocks in Senegal collapsed and only about 36,000 West Africans – mostly from Senegal and Mauritania – fled to the Canary Islands in an attempt to enter Europe, according to a report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
Many abnormal immigrants from Gambia and Senegal with whom Diálogo China spoke – as well as their families – say that the search for greener pastures in Europe is their main motivation for leaving.
Like Njie, Wuyeh Sanyang left Gunjur in 2021 on a boat carrying more than a hundred young Gambians, according to his family. He has not been heard from since.
“Before he left, he kept talking about the difficulties the family is going through,” his mother Sariba Ceesay, 68, said of her son’s motivations. “All I do is pray that we will unite.
“The saddest thing for me is that I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. “
The fisheries sector has given Gambians hope over the years, especially young people looking for work, but that hope has been dashed recently when regional governments signed new fisheries agreements with commercial fishing operators.
Nine out of 10 fishing vessels legally fishing in Gambian waters are foreign owned, according to the Ministry of Fisheries and Water Resources website. As of late there are five fishmeal and fish oil processing facilities authorized to operate in this small country.
In October 2018, The Gambia signed a six-year fisheries agreement with the European Union (EU), which gives the bloc’s vessels the ability to catch up to 3,300 tonnes of tuna and 750 tonnes of hake per year in Gambian waters. The EU paid €550,000 consistent with the year for this privilege.
Speaking to the local press in 2019, environmental expert Abdoukarim Sanneh said that while the EU’s agreement with The Gambia also covers cooperation to fight illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, it still amounted to a “trade injustice”. They pose a major risk to local small-scale fishers, he added.
The scenario is similar in Senegal, where fishing contributes more than 3% of GDP, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Most of the beneficiaries are artisanal fishermen and processors, with 53,000 direct jobs and more than one million who depend on fishing. The report notes that overfishing, pollutants and climate change are the biggest threats to the sector’s labour market.
Fisheries account for 10. 2% of Senegal’s exports and generated $400 million in profits in 2021, according to a report jointly released through the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Global Agricultural Information Network in 2022.
However, like The Gambia, Senegal also has a fisheries agreement with the EU, signed in 2014, whereby up to 38 EU vessels can fish in Senegalese waters in exchange for a payment of €8. 69 million from the EU. The important agreement expired in 2019. However, Senegal and the EU have since extended it with a new protocol. Other foreign-owned commercial trawlers also fish in Senegalese waters.
In a 2019 paper, researchers looked at the EU’s so-called sustainable fisheries agreements and found the damage those agreements are causing to West African countries. Its authors then published a paper noting that other countries, including China and Russia, were also part of the picture. .
Rashid Sumaila, a professor at the University of British Columbia who writes about sustainable fisheries, says West Africa is penalized by such agreements because its countries get bills for a small fraction of the price of their marine resources. “Fishing communities in West Africa are wasting their fish without seeing the taxes collected,” says Suamila. “So they end up with a double whammy: no fish and no dollars!”
For Aliou Ba, acting director of Greenpeace Africa’s oceans crusade, the biggest risk to West Africa’s oceans and communities is the unsustainable exploitation of marine and terrestrial resources, facilitated by unfair agreements, neo-colonial practices and IUU fishing.
“These modes of exploitation exacerbate socio-economic inequalities, pushing many others into depression and emigration,” Ba says. “And Europe’s [border policies] make this extraordinarily dangerous. “
West African countries lose an estimated $9. 4 billion a year due to IUU fishing, according to a 2022 report by the Coalition for Financial Transparency.
Ba highlights that “too many” young Africans have disappeared while emigrating in search of better lives. It is “high time for national authorities to invest in monitoring and surveillance of the oceans, and develop sustainable development policies capable of creating hope and lasting jobs,” he says.
To incentivise businesses in the sector to spur local employment, “fisheries need massive investment, including subsidies to help local fishers with boats and storage facilities,” says Gambian migration specialist Bubacarr Singhateh.
It adds that policies are needed that protect the marine ecosystem through sustainable fishing and ensure that perpetrators of fisheries-related crimes (such as fishing in a domain and the illegal use of giant nets) pay damages to ensure that sufficiently good restitution is provided to those affected.
West African governments have begun to expand physically powerful fishing policies designed to ensure a long-term future for local fishermen.
The Gambia’s recent top fisheries and aquaculture policy, published in 2018, sets as its main objective the sustainable progression and control of commercial fisheries with the “full participation” of Gambians. It also aims to expand the capacity of Gambians to fill at least 30% of all professional jobs on board fishing vessels, and create jobs through “value-added activities on land”, including fish smoking and other processing.
Senegal also has progressive policies, adding its recent FAO-facilitated Agreement on Port State Measures, which is the first binding foreign agreement to focus particularly on IUU fishing.
However, for such policies to be truly effective, governments will need to prevent the signing of agreements that threaten to endanger the region’s fish stocks, such as the EU agreement, which contributes to overfishing and overexploitation of local fish species. Also crack down on Chinese trawlers operating in The Gambia, Senegal and Guinea Bissau, which are lately doing so in a move that undermines the principles of sustainable fishing.
Earlier this year, an Amnesty International report detailed the devastating effects of overfishing in Sanyang, a coastal town in the Gambia, calling foreign-owned commercial trawlers and fishmeal factories harmful, dissolving local livelihoods, creating food and distrust, and perpetuating human rights abuses.
In an article accompanying the report, Samira Daoud, Amnesty’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said: “The Gambian government will urgently need to take all mandatory measures to hold them to account and protect the human rights of the affected communities, adding to their economic situation and social rights. “
When West African countries engage in fisheries agreements with other countries, Sumaila suggests that, to be fair, “they want to work collaboratively, as Pacific island states do. This will strengthen the region’s bargaining power, allowing it to obtain a fair percentage of the price of resources.
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Kebba Jeffang
Kebba Jeffang is the West Africa Regional Editor of China Dialogue. It is located in The Gambia.
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