KENYA AND MOZAMBIQUE ARE TAKING ILLEGAL FISHING SERIOUSLY – NOW TANZANIA MUST TOO

Posted By Stop Illegal Fishing:19th Sep, 2016: Best Practice and Lessons Learnt

Illegal fishing has long been a blight on East Africa’s coastal economies. The practice costs Kenya an estimated Sh10 billion every year, and Tanzania loses 220 million US dollars in revenue collection annually. In 2013, meanwhile, only one of the 130 vessels fishing in Mozambican waters was actually from Mozambique.

Things, however, appear to be changing. Mozambique has already taken steps in the right direction – in 2013, it invested in its maritime security infrastructure by purchasing several patrol vessels through the government backed EMATUM agency.

Kenya appears to be following Mozambique’s lead. It spent Sh3.6 billion last month on a new ship to patrol its Indian Ocean territory, and President Uhuru Kenyatta recently announced a major new crackdown on the foreign vessels blamed for illegal fishing in the country’s waters.

Tanzania’s approach, however, has been somewhat less inspiring. While a government programme has been encouraging communities to form groups to protect their fishing areas, there has been little in the way of serious investment in security infrastructure, as there has been in Mozambique and Kenya.

The danger for Tanzania is that with the neighbouring countries either side of it cracking down on illegal fishing, the foreign trawlers operating in the region will not stop the practice – they will simply move along the East African coast into Tanzanian waters.

This could be disastrous for Tanzania, with the biggest losers being the Tanzanian people. Illegal fishing has a huge range of negative knock-on effects, from local employment to food security and prices.

Mozambique and Kenya having both taken sensible steps to invest in their maritime security – it is more important than ever that Tanzania does too.

SOURCE: Our Waters Our Future

19 September 2016

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