Accra – The coast of Ghana used to offer the richest fishing in Africa. Now the country has to import protein-rich food from abroad because international companies are stripping the waters bare.

Jerome closes the door, fearful of being overheard saying what everyone knows: His village is only just clinging on to life, like the once-plentiful fish stocks that sustained it and other coastal communities in Ghana.

"They grab our fishes," he says. "If that continues, we won’t have any fishes anymore," says Jerome, a man in his mid-40s who would only use a false name.

By "they" he means the giant industrial trawlers that come from Asia and Europe. Overfishing there means they have had to cast their nets further afield, often along the coast of West Africa.

Some of them come officially under EU-subsidised "fisheries partnership agreements" with the government. Others come without a permit and usually head for Ghana.

Dubious contracts with local fishing companies mean they can fish under the Ghanaian flag. But, apart from jobs on the large ships, nothing goes to the local economy or people. The yield and profit all goes abroad, critics say.

Dissenting voices are quickly silenced, as Jerome learned the hard way: He was sacked from the regional fisheries department for criticising the way traditional livelihoods were being destroyed.

Local fishermen in their banana-shaped wooden canoes stand no chance against the industrial leviathans that travel in fleets and use radar to locate and net up to 250 tons of fish a day, more than a Ghanian fisherman catches in his entire life.

The trawler nets have lights along their edges to attract the fish. Fine meshed nets wreak indiscriminate damage on the delicate balance of life in the seas.

"In the shoal are little fishes," says Kyei Kwadwo Yamoah of the non-governmental organisation Friends of the Nation. "The little fishes are worthless. They are waste, which is thrown back to the sea. But they are not worthless for the ecological system. I say … imagine: How will the ecological system develop without the small fishes?"

Most devastating of all is the practice of trawling in pairs, when two vessels sail with a giant net unfurled between them and scoop up anything in their path.

To even the odds just a little, the locals have started to use dynamite. The method cuts out the laborious task of locating concentrations of fish. The fishermen need only to pick up the dead fish from the surface.

They know it is an unsavoury way of treating the waters that sustained generations before them, but feel they have no choice against such ruthlessly efficient competition.

"The fishing system has collapsed. Fish is very expensive. You won’t find any octopus and red fish … . And if you see one, they take it to Takoradi, to the foreign people, the rich people, because we can’t afford them anymore," says Jerome.

Fish is a main source of animal protein in Ghana, but most homes these days can only serve it sparingly, with a main meal that is essentially just rice.

In a bid to avoid bloodshed, the government has introduced some regulations. Only wooden canoes are allowed to work waters 30 metres deep in an area stretching 15 kilometres from land.

But locals are sceptical, asking when such regulations have ever been followed in the past. Jerome, like fishermen everywhere here, know the super trawlers ply the exclusion zone too.

The government’s Fisheries Commission denies this.

"We have an automatic identification system. That means every vessel is registered by a chip," say Daniel Awuku-Nyanteh, who heads the supervisory authorities. "We can reconstruct exactly where they are. The marine patrol works day and night. … They give their best to control illegal fishing."

He also rejects claims that foreign ships swarm here, insisting that only "joint ventures" with 75-percent-Ghanaian crew can work these waters.

But that does little to change the view from the perspective of locals. They see increasing poverty breeding more crime, drug use and prostitution, and the once-proud fishing nation now dependent on other countries for sustenance.

Indeed, half of its fish is imported and experts warn that the future of its fisheries sector can lie only in cultivated aquaculture. – Sapa-dpa

Source: http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/science/environment/empty-oceans-empty-stomachs-1.1789595

2 December, 2014

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