Poor West African fishermen, prevented by an international treaty from fishing off their own shores, are forced to buy their own sardines in European cans, reports Paul Brown
Mauritanian fishermen sit in the harbour gazing out to sea. In the distance, where Africa bulges out into the Atlantic, they watch sunlight glinting off other men’s boats. They dare not set sail for fear of being jailed – their government has banned the catching of this coast’s traditional harvest of sardines. The reason? Overfishing.
Yet vessels are out there fishing: factory trawlers are scooping up the sardines they are not allowed to take. The Mauritanian government is powerless to stop this plunder because under a European Union agreement the state is getting more than $600-million in hard cash over six years to allow unlimited fishing of its waters. The country needs the money to pay off its foreign debts, some of them loans from Europe.
So the subsistence fishermen watch while Dutch trawlers catch and freeze 300 tons of sardines a day. But not this month. Relief for their despair arrived, in the form of a moratorium during October. European green groups have shamed the European Commission into ordering a halt to the sardine fishing while the issue of over-exploitation is considered.
But for African fishermen, deprived of both income and their main source of protein, something hurts even more. It’s what the Europeans do with their resources. The Dutch factory trawlers take the sardines to the Canary Islands, package them and send them back to West Africa. So if the Mauritanians want to eat the fish that were once swimming off their own coast they have to buy them from European suppliers. The scarcely affordable prices reflect the use of expensive ships and Canary Island labour paid at EU rates.
Europeans do not eat enough sardines to match the West African harvest. The EU’s main interest is to keep expensive subsidised fishing fleets employed and provide employment for Europeans. The chief markets for tinned sardines are those countries that would normally have eaten fresh sardines caught by local fishermen. So the sardines packaged in Las Palmas go on sale in West Africa.
This is the worst current example of the EU’s exploitation of its financial power to gain access to the fisheries of poorer countries in exchange for a cash payment. There are 25 such agreements, 14 of them with countries in Africa and the Indian Ocean permitting about 4 000 European vessels to fish in non-EU zones.
Although the sardine catches are sold back to the region where they are caught, the main market for these foreign catches is elsewhere. More than 50% of the fish now eaten in Europe is imported from distant waters. Japan’s home market sucks in huge quantities of fish from around the world.
Once the poor man’s source of protein, fish has become far more expensive than meat. There is a saying often quoted at fisheries talks: “Fish have a habit of jumping on a rich man’s table.” This is particularly true of Japan, which has a large, distant- water fleet and an insatiable appetite for fish. While Europeans eat common tuna caught off the Philippines and Indonesia, the Japanese scour the world for the endangered blue-finned tuna much prized for sushi. Any fish caught is flown back packed in ice for the Japanese table. This summer one blue-finned tuna sold for $40 000 at auction in the Tokyo fish market.
But the high price of fish and its image as the rich man’s food is a recent phenomenon. Fish as a source of protein and an item of trade is as old as civilisation. The Greeks colonised the Black Sea because of its plentiful fish stocks, and salt cod fed much of Europe from Elizabethan times.
In this century distant-water fleets have been dominated by the Soviet Union. The often rusting hulks of this vast navy of fishing vessels are still employed in emptying the seas. In the old Soviet days the best fish were sold for cash to the West. Lower-quality fish, often processed on board, went to feed the people back home. Nothing has changed under Russian capitalism – the fleet is still mostly engaged in exploiting international waters unchecked by enforceable restrictions. Japan has the second-largest distant-water fleet, followed closely by the EU.
Many of the fishing agreements made by the EU are with poor countries, such as Mauritania and neighbouring Senegal. Both need money to pay back aid loans. Of course it was never intended that the sardines should go back to Mauritania. The EU’s distant-water fishing agreements, as they are called, were designed to pay needy countries for “surplus” fish stocks not fully exploited by the host country.
Often part of the deal is to boost the fishing fleets and technical know-how of developing countries with investments so that they make better use of resources. Mauritania is mostly desert, with 2,3- million people, many of whom are nomadic. The rich marine stocks are the country’s main source of wealth, and the EU, Japan, Ukraine and Russia have all made deals to fish the country’s waters. So large have been the combined catches of these fleets that even though the West African coast used to be one of the most productive in the world its fisheries are now in danger of collapse.
Another irony is that the Mauritanian Research Centre, which sounded the alarm on over-fishing, was funded by the EU. It was on the centre’s recommendation that a two- month moratorium on sardine catches was imposed from September 1. After initially choosing to ignore it, the European Commission ordered EU vessels out of the area a month later. Research has now begun into the size of the sardine stocks and a safe level for fishing. The project is being been funded by Groupe Palevliet, the Dutch company that owns the factory trawlers.
Resistance to this exploitation of Third World fish stocks is being mounted in Brussels by a group called the Coalition for Fair Fishing Agreements, a loose-knit but respected lobby of environmental and fishing organisations from the poorer countries. It points out that fishing agreements do not comply with the European Commission’s stated policy of sustainable development and is telling the politicians that such agreements are depriving poor people in these countries of their best source of protein – and pushing them towards malnutrition.
The dilemma of West African states bordering the Atlantic is merely a symptom of a worldwide crisis over fish stocks. The problem is widely acknowledged, but the political will to solve it is lacking. Capital to build larger and larger fishing vessels is provided by governments despite clear scientific evidence that most fisheries of the world are over-exploited.
Every country with distant-water fleets heavily subsidises them, in blatant contravention of World Trade Organisation rules. Environment groups say, and the United Nations accepts, that this is jeopardising the health of the world fisheries, but so far nothing has been done. Some hope lies in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea negotiated in 1982, which has given states the power to create 300km exclusive economic zones. It is this agreement that forces the EU to pay for the right to fish off Mauritania.
A sensible fishing policy depends on these states having an understanding of how to exploit their oceanic resources to best advantage. As the World Wide Fund for Nature puts it: “The coastal state, if acting rationally, will, or will not, decide to grant access in the light of the expected impact that this decision will have upon the state’s long-term economic and social interests.”
It is a judgment other countries need to make, too. As the Mauritanian fishermen await permission to relaunch their boats they must reflect how little evidence there is that anyone in the world is acting sensibly in everyone’s long-term interests.