Empty Seas
	Europe Takes Africa's Fish; Migrants Follow
	By SHARON LAFRANIERE
	New York Times, January 14, 2008
	
	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."
	
	
	
	
	Copyright 2008  The New York Times Company

	 
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