BLUE ECONOMY AT RISK
Even as West Africa struggles to plug rampant illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, rising sea surface temperature poses new challenges
SITTING ON Ghana’s Apam beach, fisherman Nana Ekow Pasnin is worried about his family’s future. His canoe just returned without a single fish, after spending a marathon 12 hours in the sea. He has never seen such an acute fish shortage in the Atlantic Ocean in his 40 years of fishing. “Earlier, we could easily fill up the 150 crates in our canoe in every trip. Today, we consider ourselves fortunate if we are able to fill just 20 crates, and such an occasion arises only once or twice a year,” says Pasnin. He says that in the past two decades or so, there has been a rapid decline in small pelagic fish in Ghana’s waters . These fish, which includes species like sardinella, sardines, anchovy and mackarel, are found near the surface and closer to shore and form an important basis of livelihood to the country’s 210,000 artisanal fisherfolk and another 2.1 million employed in allied industires. “In 2015, the county recorded the lowest small pelagic production of 19,608 tonnes. This was 14 per cent of the production in 1996, when the highest small pelagic production was recorded,” says Socrates Apetorgbor, fisheries specialist with the sustainable fisheries management project of the United States Agency for International Development (usaid).
Francis Agbeshie from the Chokomey fishing community in Ghana’s Bartianar area says members from his community tried to cope with the crisis by ditching the canoe for inshore vessels with engines that allow them to venture into deep seas. “The shift worked for a while, but now our catch is dwindling again,” he says. Agbeshie and other artisanal fisherfolk, who form 80 per cent of the country’s fishing community, blame the increase in industrial trawlers, both in international and Ghana’s domestic waters, and their illegal activities for the shortage. “In the 1980s, Ghana had just 14 foreign vessels. Today, it is between 500 and 700,” says Kofi Agbogah, director of Hen Mpoano, a Ghana-based non-profit which works with coastal communities. The situation is no different for the other West African countries along the Atlantic Ocean where artisanal fisheries is an important basis of livelihood; according to a January-February 2018 study by fisheries researchers at The University of Britsh Columbia, Canada, published in Conservation Letters, the sector provides employment to 7 million people in the region.
Some experts, however, say the shortage could be partly because of climate change. Pelagic fish are highly sensitive to sea surface temperature. While some have an affinity for temperate waters others prefer tropical waters. As sea surface temperature rises with global warming, it affects the abundance and distribution of these species by altering their migratory paths. Besides, small pelagic fish feed primarily on plankton. As warming oceans slow plankton growth, it might also be affecting the abundance of the stocks, says a Unesco report. Hawa Bint Yaqub, deputy director at Ghana Fisheries Commission,
says the average sea surface temperature near Ghana beach increased from 26.2oC in 2000 to 27.4oC in 2010; that decade, the country’s annual average pelagic production fell from 22,000 tonnes to 12,000 tonnes. Worse, several studies suggest that the situation will exacerbate with each passing year. A June 2017 research titled “Climate change and marine fisheries: Least developed countries top global index of vulnerability” says even in the most optimistic future scenario, sea surface temperatures are expected to increase substantially by the end of the century, and its impact on marine fisheries will be most visible in poor countries. Over 25 of the world’s 31 least developed countries with coastlines are in the top half of the vulnerability index, says the paper, published in Plos One. Even under business as usual, sea surface temperatures are projected to increase by 0.62-0.85°C in the near future and 2.44-3.32°C over the long term, warns a 2016 paper titled “Climatic drivers of change and the future of African ocean”. An increase of 1-2 °C is enough to “badly” impact fisheries stock, it warns.
Pushed by both industrial trawlers and climate
change, the artisanal fisherfolk of West Africa are now living on the edge. In the desperation for a good catch, many of them are embracing illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing practices (iuu), such as using light to attract fish and explosives to catch them, using nets with small mesh size to catch juvenile fish and fishing during the breeding season. Some have even joined hands with foreign industrial trawlers which have combed the ocean to feed the European and Asian markets, both legally and illegally.
Illegal everywhere
The genesis of the problem, to quite some extent, lies in the policies of West African governments. They have been selling the rights to fish their waters to rich European governments, who have already decimated their own seas. In recent years, fleets from China, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea and Taiwan have also expanded their presence in the region’s territorial waters. Agbogah says these international trawler operators usually form partnership with local fisherfolk to enter the
domestic water for fishing. The local partner, in most cases, exists only on paper while the trawlers indulge in illegal activities, such as “saiko” where they indiscriminately harvest fish, before illegally trans-shipping the catch at sea to canoes to evade taxes (see “Ghana needs stronger laws” p47). “Their fleet includes a couple of dozen megatrawlers that target small pelagic fish to make feed for salmon, chicken, pigs and other animals grown at aquaculture and livestock farms around the world,” says Dyhia Belhabib, advisor for the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us research project, who has co-authored the Conservation Letters study. Each mega trawler, says Belhabib, can capture up to 20,000 tonnes of fish a year, equal to the annual catch of more than 1,700 traditional Senegalese pirogues (flat-bottomed, wooden dugout boats).
These industrial vessels also often intrude into waters reserved for artisanal fishers. A 2017 research by EU-funded Securing Sustainable Fisheries project in Ghana shows in 2016, thousands of cases were recorded where industrial vessels destroyed nets and canoes of traditional fisherfolk at sea. Yet only 5 per cent of these cases were reported to the Fisheries Commission, and less than 1 per cent resulted in compensation. “The vessels often escape after destroying our nets. If caught, they bribe the local officials and give us a part of their daily catch and leave,” says Nana Kobina Caique, chief fisherman of Apam community.
But their legally-sanctioned activity provides a cover for these iuu fishing activities. “Commercial trawlers that operate under flags of convenience, and unload in ports that do not record their catch, are engaging in organised theft disguised as commerce,” says former UN chief and Noble Laureate Kofi Annan, who now chairs the Africa Progress Panel. The panel estimates that iuu fishing accounts for between one-third and half of the total regional catch. The 2011 Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) report also highlights that iuu is rampant across West Africa, which has some of the world’s richest tuna fishing grounds. “Over 50 per cent of the fisheries resources in the stretch of coast ranging from Senegal to Nigeria have already been overfished,” it says.
iuu fishing, which often accounts for a large proportion of the total catch, is now hitting the coffers of West African countries. A report by the Overseas Development Institute (odi) in 2016 says Senegal lost around $300 million in 2012 due to iuu fishing, which is equivalent to 2 per cent of gross domestic product. Similarly, Guinea loses $110 million a year and Sierra Leone loses $29 million annually due to iuu fishing. The entire region faces a loss to the tune of $2.3 billion a year due to iuu fishing, says a March 2017 study published in Frontiers in Marine Science journal.
The Chinese checkers
The threat is maximum from Chinese companies that have expanded their fishing operations in Africa from 13 vessels in 1985 to 462 vessels in 2013, or one-fifth of the total Chinese-owned distant water fishing (dwf) fleet, according to a Greenpeace report, “Africa’s fisheries Paradise at a Crossroad”. By 2016, it rose 2,600 vessels, which was 10 times that of the US, as per a New York Times story. This has been possible because China started a subsidy for dwf in 2006 and had spent $431 million, says the Greenpeace report. Explaining the Chinese push to dwf fleet, an fao report, “Fish to 2030: Prospects for Fisheries and Aquaculture” says China will consume 38 per cent of world’s fish production by 2030. It projects that Asia will account for 70 per cent of the global fish consumption by 2030.
The Greenpeace report further says that the Chinese flagged and/or owned vessels currently fishing in African waters are predominantly bottom trawlers, one of the most destructive fishing methods in the modern fishing industry. This, despite that China does not allow bottom trawlers on its own water. The ships are so large that they scoop up as many fish in one week as Senegalese boat catch in one year, says a March 2017 research published in Frointers in Marine Science.