WiLD Blog

The New York Times series Empty Seas documents the impact of illegal fishing in Africa by large commercial pirate fleets on the migration patters of West African fishermen. A similar situation exists in Mexico, where many fishermen impacted by the loss of fish then migrate to the U.S., or worse get involved in the drug trade.

KAYAR, Senegal — Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.
“I could be a fisherman there,” he said. “Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore.”

Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing. That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.

Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations.

The region’s governments bear much of the blame for their fisheries’ decline. Many have allowed a desire for money from foreign fleets to override concern about the long-term health of their fisheries. Illegal fishermen are notoriously common; efforts to control fishing, rare. But in the view of West African fishermen, Europe is having its fish and eating them, too. Their own waters largely fished out, European nations have steered their heavily subsidized fleets to Africa.

“As Europe has sought to manage its fisheries and to limit its fishing, what we’ve done is to export the overfishing problem elsewhere, particularly to Africa,” said Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, a London-based research group.

European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fishing deals with Africa since 1979, is a scapegoat for Africa’s management failures and the misdeeds of other foreign fleets. They argue that African officials oversell fishing rights, inflate potential catches and allow pirate vessels and local boats free rein in breeding grounds. Pierre Chavance, a scientist with the French Institute for Research and Development, said both foreign fleets and African governments allowed financial considerations to trump concerns for fish or local fishermen.

“One side has a big interest to sell, and the other side has a big interest to buy,” he said. “The negotiations are based upon what people want to hear, not the reality.” Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.

Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources. The coastal stock of bottom-dwelling fish is just a quarter of what it was 25 years ago, studies show. Already, scientists say, the sea’s ecological balance has shifted as species lower on the food chain replace some above them.

In Mauritania, lobsters vanished years ago. The catch of octopus — now the most valuable species — is four-fifths of what it should be if it were not overexploited. A 2002 report by the European Commission found that the most marketable fish species off the coast of Senegal were close to collapse — essentially sliding toward extinction.

“The sea is being emptied,” said Moctar Ba, a consultant who once led scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa. In a region where at least 200,000 people depend on the sea for their livelihoods, local investments in fishing industries are drying up with the fish stocks. In Guinea-Bissau, fishermen who were buying more boats less than a decade ago now complain they are in debt and looking to get out of the business.

“Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue,” said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose Senegalese family sold their pirogue for $500 to pay for an illegal — and ultimately unsuccessful — voyage to Spain. “Now even five pirogues would not be enough.”

Today’s New York Times includes the second in a series on illegal fishing off of the coast of Africa. This series illustrates the tremendous social, political and environmental consequences of large-scale commercial fishing.

LONDON — Walking at the Brixton market among the parrotfish, doctorfish and butterfish, Effa Edusie is surrounded by pieces of her childhood in Ghana. Caught the day before far off the coast of West Africa, they have been airfreighted to London for dinner. Ms. Edusie’s relatives used to be fishermen. But no more. These fish are no longer caught by Africans.

On the underside of the waterlogged brown cardboard box that holds the snapper is the improbable red logo of the China National Fisheries Corporation, one of the largest suppliers of West African fish to Europe. Europe’s dinner tables are increasingly supplied by global fishing fleets, which are depleting the world’s oceans to feed the ravenous consumers who have become the most effective predators of fish.

Fish is now the most traded animal commodity on the planet, with about 100 million tons of wild and farmed fish sold each year. Europe has suddenly become the world’s largest market for fish, worth more than 14 billion euros, or about $22 billion a year. Europe’s appetite has grown as its native fish stocks have shrunk so that Europe now needs to import 60 percent of fish sold in the region, according to the European Union.

In Europe, the imbalance between supply and demand has led to a thriving illegal trade. Some 50 percent of the fish sold in the European Union originates in developing nations, and much of it is laundered like contraband, caught and shipped illegally beyond the limits of government quotas or treaties. The smuggling operation is well financed and sophisticated, carried out by large-scale mechanized fishing fleets able to sweep up more fish than ever, chasing threatened stocks from ocean to ocean.

The European Commission estimates that more than 1.1 billion euros in illegal seafood, or $1.6 billion worth, enters Europe each year. The World Wide Fund for Nature contends that up to half the fish sold in Europe are illegally caught or imported. While some of the so-called “pirate fishing” is carried out by non-Western vessels far afield, European ships are also guilty, some of them operating close to home. An estimated 40 percent of cod caught in the Baltic Sea are illegal, said Mireille Thom, a spokeswoman for Joe Borg, the European Union’s commissioner of fisheries and maritime affairs.
 
Tracing where the fish come from is nearly impossible, many experts say. Groups like Greenpeace and the Environmental Justice Foundation have documented a range of egregious and illegal fishing practices off West Africa. Huge boats, owned by companies in China, South Korea and Europe, fly flags of convenience from other nations. They stay at sea for years at a time, fishing, fueling, changing crews and unloading their catches to refrigerated boats at sea, making international monitoring extremely difficult.

When the Environmental Justice Foundation, which has studied the fishing industry, teamed up with a Greenpeace boat in 2006, more that half of the 104 vessels it followed off the coast of Guinea were fishing illegally, or were involved in illegal practices, the study found.

While small local fishermen in West Africa tend to fish sustainably, large seagoing boats use practices that are dangerous to the environment, particularly the use of vast nets to trawl the sea bed. The nets destroy coral, and unsettle eggs and fish breeding grounds. They gulp up fish that cannot be sold because they are too small. Their competition decimates local fishing industries. By the time huge mechanized vessels have thrown the unsalable juveniles back into the sea, they are often dead, bringing stocks another step closer to extinction. Of the estimated 90 million tons of fish caught worldwide each year, about 30 million tons are discarded, Ms. Vesper of the World Wide Fund for Nature said.

 

In the Sea of Cortez the estimate is that each inch of the sea floor is raked at least seven times each year. Bottom trawling has a huge impact on ocean life and destroys critical fish spawning areas.

 

November 15, 2006 — By Patricia Reaney, Reuters
LONDON — Deep-sea trawling is destroying underwater mountains teeming with marine life and causing irreparable damage to ecosystems, scientists warned on Wednesday.

Most of the underwater volcanic mountains, or seamounts, which contain deep-sea corals and are home to thousands of marine species, are in unregulated areas.

Over-exploitation of traditional fish such as cod and hake has prompted fleets to trawl the high seas for deep-dwelling species such as orange roughy, alfonsino and roundnose grenadier, but they are harming biodiversity in vulnerable regions of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

This is why WiLDCOAST advocates for MPAs and marine reserves.   

Overfishing and pollution threaten accelerated loss of ocean species, ecosystems and humans’ food supplies, US and Canadian researchers reported in the November 3 issue of the US journal, Science.

 ”Our analyses suggest that ‘business as usual’ would foreshadow serious threats to global food security, coastal water quality and ecosystem stability, affecting current and future generations,” the team of ecologists and economists wrote in the most exhaustive study to date of the subject.

  ”Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world’s oceans, we saw the same picture emerging,” said lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University, in Canada. He said the disappearance of species from ocean ecosystems had been accelerating.

 ”Now we begin to see some of the consequences. If the trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime - by 2048,” Worm said. “In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems.

  At this point, 29 percent of currently fished species were considered “collapsed” in 2003 - that is, their catches had declined by 90 percent or more, he said. “It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating.”

 The study showed that the loss of one species accelerates the unravelling of the overall ecosystem, while conversely every species recovered adds significantly to its stability and ability to withstand stresses.

 Thus, the researchers determined, the problem is far greater than losing a key source of food.

 The effects of damage to the oceans included a decline in water quality by biological filtering and the protection of shorelines by marine species.

 The loss of marine diversity also appeared to increase the risks of coastal flooding, harmful algal blooms, oxygen depletion and fish kills.

 ”The data show us it’s not too late,” he added. “We can turn this around.”

 The authors concluded that an ecosystem-based management approach towards restoring marine biodiversity - including integrated fisheries management, pollution control and creation of marine reserves - was essential. - Sapa-AFP