January 14, 2008
Empty Seas


Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow




By SHARON LAFRANIERE






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.
The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and
deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.
Nonetheless, Mr. Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.
“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.”
Fishermen like Mr. Diouf argue that Africans should have first
priority in their own waters — an idea enshrined in a 1994 United
Nations treaty on the seas that acknowledges the right of local
governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to their surplus
stocks.
But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa’s nearly 2,000-mile coast.
Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal’s fishery was in
trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European
Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by
three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should “cause
significant alarm.”
But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed
a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million
a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.
Four years later, Mauritania followed suit. Despite reports that
octopus were overfished by nearly a third, in 2006 Mauritania’s
government sold six more years’ access to 43 European Union vessels for
$146 million a year — the equivalent of nearly a fifth of Mauritania’s
government budget.
“I don’t know a government in the region that can say no,” said Mr.
Chavance, the French scientist. “This is good money, and they need it.”
Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who leads a Mauritanian association of small
fishermen, said: “The E.U. has the money, so it has the power. It is
easier to sacrifice the local fishermen.”
Those sacrifices are multiplying in Mauritania. One of the few
countries with a private industrial fleet, most of it jointly owned
with the Chinese, it has lost one-third of roughly 150 trawlers since
1996.
Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns P.C.A., a fish exporting
firm in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running.
Their two new orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou’s
rough-hewn harbor.
“We can’t compete with the European Union,” Ahmed Cherif said as he
strolled past row after row of idle pirogues. “The government should
have kept this resource for Mauritanians. Let these people work.”
Europe is just one foreign contributor to fish declines. Countries
from Asia and the former Soviet Union also dispatched ships to ply
northwest Africa’s seas. But often those fleets stay for shorter
durations and without the same promises of responsible fishing and
local development.
In fact, little development has taken place since the European Union
signed its first fish deal with a West African nation in 1979. The huge
economic benefits that come from processing and exporting the catch
remain firmly in European hands.
African governments either misspent or diverted the funds earmarked
for development to more pressing needs, while the Europeans sometimes
made only token efforts on promised projects. Nouadhibou harbor, for
instance, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight
years after the European Union promised to clear them to help develop
the port.
In their defense, European officials say they moved to reform their
fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that ship operators
were overfishing and were undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio
Donatella, who heads the European Union unit that negotiates fishing
deals, says the new agreements are models of responsible fishing and
transparency.
“One cannot say we are not fishing the surplus or that we have not
respected scientific recommendations,” he said. Ultimately, African
governments must protect and manage their own resources, he said.
Examples of mismanagement abound. The number of pirogues in six
northwest African countries exploded from 3,000 to 19,000 in the last
half-century, but Senegal and other nations have only recently begun to
license them.
Guinea-Bissau, a nation of 1.4 million people, is a prime example of
how not to run a fishery. According to Vladimir Kacyznski, a marine
scientist with the University of Washington, no one has comprehensively studied the nation’s coastal waters for at least 20 years.
For two years, Sanji Fati was in charge of enforcing Guinea-Bissau’s
fishing rules. When he took the job in 2005, he said, his agency did
not have a single working patrol boat to monitor hundreds of pirogues
and dozens of industrial trawlers, most of them foreign. An estimated
40 percent of fish were caught without licenses or in violation of
regulations, and vessel operators routinely lied about their haul.
Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily
bought off.
Mr. Fati tightened enforcement, but said he still felt as if he was
waging a one-man war. A few months ago, he left in frustration.
That bleak picture did not stop Guinea-Bissau and the European Union
from agreeing last May to allow European boats to fish its waters for
shrimp, fish, octopus and tuna. Over the next four years, the agreement
will pump $42 million into a government that is months behind in paying
salaries and still emerging from civil war.
Daniel Gomes, Guinea-Bissau’s 12th fishing minister in eight years,
said he had tried to be conservative in how much access to grant
foreigners, despite paltry scientific data and severe economic
pressures.
Still, asked whether his nation would end up with empty waters, he
replied: “This prospect is not out of the question. This could happen.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/14/world/africa/14fishing.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print