How African fishermen feel the burn of their own practices

Baskets filled with beautiful fresh fish: a mouthwatering sight for many. But these kinds of abundant catches are becoming rare along Africa's Atlantic Coast. Years of bad fishing practices and overfishing have increasingly devastated the seabed.

Artisanal fishermen are struggling to find fish and feed their families, while massive global trawlers are having to resort to more and more inventive — and often destructive — methods to keep their business model going. Solutions for more sustainable practices seem hard to come by. And on top of that, the climate crisis isn't exactly helping, either.

At a symposium held in Rabat, Morocco this week, delegates explored new ways to reconcile destructive fishing practices with preserving biodiversity. Some of the attendees at the ATLAFCO (The Ministerial Conference on Fisheries Cooperation among African States bordering the Atlantic Ocean) were the very local fishermen who are most affected by this turning of the tide.

"About ten minutes after putting the aquatic bulbs under the water … I would encircle [the fish] with the net," recalled Bertin, who has been fishing in the Bay of Benin for over 30 years.

For the 50-year-old man from Benin, fishing used to be a rather lucrative business — until things changed a few years ago.

Desperate measures

Nowadays, he and his fellow fishermen feel helpless as they see large foreign boats in the distance racing in first to snatch off their catch of the day. Artisanal fishermen like Bertin, meanwhile, still go out to sea in canoes and small vessels. The competition looks like a game of David versus Goliath.

But that's far from the only issue: off the coast of Ghana, due to years of overfishing, the quantity of fish caught has almost dropped by half in the past fifteen years. Fishermen like Bertin simply don't know what the future holds.

However, just like the major fishing conglomerates from abroad, local fishermen in Ghana and neighboring countries are also looking for increasingly inventive ways to continue reeling in their catch. For example, artisanal fishermen in Ghana now resorting to poisoning fish and are even using dynamite to kill fish at night. 

"In Ghana, I have seen people using chemicals like a soap powder called Omo. Some use heavy means like dynamite. With these techniques, you can just pick [the fish] up," said Bertin.

Locals are a part of the problem

These techniques, however, take a heavy toll on the environment and are therefore against the law. Against this backdrop, Bertin's complaints about struggling to secure his livelihood might fall on deaf ears, as he and other local fishermen appear to have become part of the problem with their unsafe and harmful practices.

Rodrigue Pelebe, a researcher at the Africa Center of Excellence in Coastal Resilience at University of Cape Coast, stresses that the use of dynamite and chemicals "destroys the marine or aquatic environment and aggravates the already-difficult situation."

"It contributes to the destruction of corals, impacts the ecological balance of life in coral reefs, and upsets the entire food chain," he told DW, adding that even when authorities clamp down on these illegal practices, fishermen continue to find new ways to scrape the bottom of the ocean.

"They still develop other harmful practices to capture the little that remains," Pelebe explained, stressing that there are several studies underway to determine the exact extent of the damage caused by these techniques over the years.

Despite the fact that dwindling numbers of fish should be proof enough of these practices' disastrous impact of these practices, Pelebe said artisanal fishermen still fail to fully understand the consequences of their actions and ignore the regulations that govern their profession.

The issue is not one of sustainability alone: according to the United Nations, 2.7 million people — almost 10% of the total population of Ghana — make their living through fishing. Furthermore, about 60% of the protein consumed in Ghana is based on fish and seafood. With the seabed running dry, food supply issues are also increasingly becoming a corollary of the crisis at sea.

An unending vicious cycle

During the symposium in Rabat, all participants agreed in principle to seek remedies to the current situation, as off the West African coast alone, the damage amounts to at least $2.3 billion (€ 2.1 billion) each year.

Abdennaji Laamrich, head of the ATLAFCO cooperation and information systems, said that better monitoring mechanisms are required to begin assessing — and addressing — the situation. African states must "also fight against these harmful techniques of local fishermen and illegal fishing," he said.

The latter appears to be the easy part in the battle against overfishing practices: Amadou Tall, program director at the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), said identifying harmful techniques among local fishermen is less difficult at least than getting on top of the latest practices employed in international waters by foreign vessels.

However, Tall stressed that this does not mean that artisanal fishermen should become the scapegoats of an issue that is far more complicated.

According his view, illegal, undeclared and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities are the main problem, representing up to 26 million tons of fish caught every year. As these practices are carried out at high sea beyond the reach of national jurisdictions, it is virtually impossible to police them.

But even though IUU activities take place miles out at sea, their ripple effect is felt back on shore, where rural coastal populations suffer the most under such illegal overfishing practices.

That's the irony of the vicious cycle of local fishermen seeking increasingly harmful methods to also get their share of fish: the Atlantic waters off the West African coast are starting to resemble a desert.

Edited by Sertan Sanderson

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