Africa's Lost Fish.(overfishing in West Africa)(Brief Article)

On a breezy afternoon in the seaside city of Kayar in Senegal, El Hadj Abdoulaye Ndoye sits with a group of other retired fishermen waiting for the boats to come in. The sea is calm, but Ndoye, 80, isn't optimistic. With fish increasingly scarce, boats have had to stay out for longer stretches, sometimes days at a time, chasing octopus off the nearby city of Mbour or venturing into the waters of neighboring Guinea, Sierra Leone and Mauritania in search of grouper, sea bream and hogfish. The wait is troublesome for Ndoye because he's hoping to receive a part of his "pension"--a portion of the younger generation's daily catch, as recompense for the instruction their elders gave them years ago. Kayar fishermen use a method that entails dragging a hundred meters or so of fishing line, with numerous baited hooks, from the back of a small wooden boat.

Fisheries have been in decline the world over, and the waters off Western Africa are no exception. In recent years, stocks have declined steeply. The reason is the same everywhere: too many boats chasing too few fish. But this time it's not the local fishermen who are causing all the trouble. The problem is European ships like the Atlantic Dawn, the pride of the Irish fleet, which weighs 14,000 tons, measures 145 meters from stem to stern and requires a crew of 100. Its nets are big enough to encircle at least half a dozen football fields and, on a good day, take in 400 tons of small fish--sardinella and horse mackerel. A single trip can bring in a haul worth more than $2 million on the wholesale market. Some 250 "factory" ships from Europe and elsewhere are now trawling the waters off Mauritania, and hundreds more fish in other areas off the West African coast. Ships like these have already depleted the North Sea and the northern Atlantic, and now they are doing the same in southern waters.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about this pillage is that it's perfectly legal. For decades Europe has leased fishing rights from Senegal, Mauritania and other West African nations. The terms of the contracts are often particularly harsh on the fishing grounds: they set no limit to the amount of fish the Europeans can catch, except what they can haul back. And that's a lot of fish. What's more, Europe shows no sign of backing away from this policy. In the past year or so the European Union has renewed several agreements that extend its fishing rights even further. Says Callum Roberts, a marine conservationist at York University in England: "This is colonialism all over again under a slightly more acceptable political guise."

Thanks largely to Europe's policies, some of West Africa's fisheries are heading for collapse. By all accounts, fish have been declining at an accelerating pace. A United Nations report earlier this year found that the catch of octopus--much prized in Western Europe--off the Mauritanian coast has been halved in the last four years. Sawfish have disappeared completely. ...