The Fish Gone, Migrants Take to Sea

Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, says that for the last six years he has netted barely enough fish to fuel his boat. So he jumped at the chance at a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.

The voyage, made in 2006, ended badly: He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long after. Nonetheless, 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 canoes, skiffs and 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 key 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, approximately 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 governments of the region bear much blame for the decline of their fisheries. Many have allowed hunger 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, 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 European Justice Foundation, a research group.

European Union officials insist that their bloc, which has negotiated fish 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 UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in an impoverished 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. 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. A 2002 study 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 formerly headed scientific research programs for Mauritania and West Africa. "The situation is very grave."

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. "Before, my whole family could live on what we caught in one pirogue," said Niadye Diouf, 28, whose 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."

In Guinea-Bissau, Arlindo Peti bought a motorized 8-meter, or 26- foot, wooden skiff with an outboard motor 11 years ago and made enough profit to buy two more boats. Now he is back to one skiff, and $10,000 in debt. His pirogue typically returns to port with just a fifth its former catch.

"If I had known it would be like this," he said, "I would never have done this."

A 1994 UN treaty on the seas allows local governments to sell foreigners fishing rights only to surplus stocks. But that rule has been repeatedly violated along northwest Africa’s 3,200-kilometer, or 2,000-mile, coast, one of the world’s most overworked fishing grounds.

Studies dating to 1991 indicated Senegal’s fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of key species had declined by three- fourths in 15 years, a finding the authors said should "cause significant alarm."

But the very week the report was issued, EU 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 EU vessels for $146 million a year, the equivalent of nearly a fifth of the government budget.

Sid-Ahmed Ould-Abeid, who heads a Mauritanian association of small fishermen, said: "The EU 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 its own private industrial fleet, it boasts 100 industrial trawlers, most of them jointly owned with Chinese partners. In 1996, there were a third more.

Ahmed and Mohamed Cherif, whose family owns a fish exporting firm called PCA in Nouadhibou, say they have lost money for two years running. Two new bright orange trawlers spend weeks docked in Nouadhibou’s rough-hewn harbor. The hundreds of pirogue owners who supply their firm deliver an ever-smaller catch.

"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 the former Soviet Union and East Asia 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 EU 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. Mauritania’s harbor at Nouadhibou, for example, remains littered with 107 wrecked fishing trawlers eight years after the EU promised to clear them to help develop the port.

In their defense, European officials say they moved to overhaul their fishing agreements in 2003 to address criticism that European ship operators were overfishing and undercutting local fishermen. Fabrizio Donatella, who heads the EU unit that negotiates fishing agreements, said the new accords were 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, he said, African governments must protect and manage their own resource.

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.

"Don’t look for management, because there is none," said Phillipe Cury, research director of the Mediterranean and Tropical Halieutic Research Center in Sete, France.

Guinea-Bissau 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.

Sanji Fati, the top enforcement officer there, said it was open season on the nation’s fishery until he took over two years ago. His agency had not 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.

Vessel operators routinely lied about their haul. Government observers were mostly illiterate, underpaid and easily bought off. Despite recent improvements, Fati said, he still feels as though he is waging one-man war. "I am almost ready to get out," he said.

None of this stopped Guinea-Bissau and the EU 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 twelfth 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."