CAPE TOWN - African countries must protect their fish stocks from the European Union, according to a new report by Dr Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood, a researcher at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.
Fisheries serve as a source of employment for millions of people in the small-scale sector on the coastline of Africa. Their fishing activities, in turn, provide food security to over 200 million Africans.
Okafor-Yarwood says to regulate the fishing industry, African countries have signed numerous agreements with trading blocs such as the European Union (EU), according to the article first published in The Conversation.
The EU has two forms of Sustainable Fisheries Partnership Agreements with African states: the tuna agreement and the mixed agreement.
According to the report, there are currently 11 agreements in force - seven tuna and four mixed agreements. Ten of these agreements are with countries in Africa, six of which are in West Africa, writes Okafor-Yarwood.
While these agreements contribute revenue to coastal states who cannot extract the resources themselves, they are not all that they seem.
Exploitative agreements
First, the value negotiated for these agreements does not commensurate with the value of species removed, as such favours the EU economically more than African states.
The report further found that depleted or overexploited species – such as bigeye and yellowfin tuna, hake and sardinella – are targeted. Okafor-Yarwood says this exacerbates the rate of depletion and undermines food and economic security for local fishers. She adds that local fishers can’t compete with the speed at which European vessels catch fish.
The report further revealed some vessels that benefit from these agreements use the access to then engage in illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing activities. For instance, the landed value of the legal catches caught by the EU fleet in Senegal was $50.9 million (R762.3 million) between 2000 and 2010, while the landed value of the illegal catch was $10 million.
In 2017, it was reported that vessels from four EU countries - Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – unlawfully authorised vessels to fish in The Gambia and Equatorial Guinea’s waters. This was in breach of the exclusivity clause in the Agreements, which prevent individual operators from making private agreements with coastal States with which the EU has established a fisheries agreement, said the report.
Nineteen ships from these countries fished with permits granted unlawfully for more than 31,000 hours in the exclusive economic zones of The Gambia and Equatorial Guinea.
According to the report, recent events suggest that there’s a lack of willingness by the EU to penalise implicated vessels. Specifically, in 2019 the Coalition for Fairer Fisheries Agreement, alongside other NGOs, sent a complaint to the European Commission asking them to initiate infringement proceedings against Italy.
Okafor-Yarwood says that African governments must not allow this to continue. “They must act to secure livelihoods for their people, even when attracting foreign direct investment.”
The opportunity cost and cost of regenerating fish stocks (depleted by all fisheries) in Africa between 1980 and 2016 was estimated at $326 billion.
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