Mamadou Sarr remembers when an artisanal fisherman in Dakar only had to helm his wooden pirogue a single kilometer offshore to find a rich bounty of sardines and cuttlefish. For generations, Senegal’s near shore was the staging ground for a noble trade passed down from father to son .
Today, as a result of industrial overfishing by foreign fleets and the effects of climate change, local fishermen must brave an often dangerous journey almost 100 kilometers into the Atlantic to find the same seafood their communities have depended on for generations.
“The resource is depleting,” said Sarr, president of the Platform of Artisanal Fishing Stakeholders in Senegal, a group that represents more than 50 fishing communities from Saint-Louis down to Cap Skirring. “With the scarcity, the fishermen who aren’t very aware become poor.”
Senegal’s struggles are emblematic of a $50 billion global crisis, with illegal fishing fleets vacuuming unprotected fish stocks around the world. But a landmark piece of international cooperation signed this week at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, aims to shine a much-needed light on the malpractice.
Sixteen countries from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe and the Pacific pledged to aggressively combat illegal fishing. The solution, they believe, lies with transparency.
The Mombasa Declaration targets increased enforcement, updated vessel registries and improved corporate accountability to crack down on the illegal trade that’s wreaking environmental havoc.
“When you try to fight illegal fishing and associated crime without transparency, you’re literally chasing ghosts,” said Amélie Giardini, the global lead for fisheries transparency at the Environmental Justice Foundation, highlighting the challenges of getting fishing nations to agree. “The fact that this declaration exists, as much as it could look like another piece of paper, and that we convinced countries to sign it, to me, that’s really important,” noting Senegal’s last -minute withdrawal from the agreement and Chile and Gabon’s eleventh-hour participation.
Nearly one in five fish is currently caught outside the law: “If we do not know who is fishing, what, where, when and how, we will never be able to tackle illegal fishing,” Giardini said.
From Peru to Papua New Guinea and Somalia to South Korea, the declaration seeks to unite “nations committed to strengthening ocean governance and leading global action on fisheries transparency.”
“When you try to fight illegal fishing and associated crime without transparency, you’re literally chasing ghosts.”
— Amélie Giardini, Environmental Justice Foundation
Such coastal and island nations are home to small-scale fisheries and maritime economies that suffer the direct consequences of illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, which decimates fish stocks and undermines food security.
“Our very existence depends on fish,” said Hon. Emelia Arthur, the Ghanaian fisheries and aquaculture minister, in a press release. Sixty percent of the country’s animal protein comes from the Gulf of Guinea, and one in ten Ghanaians works in the fishing industry.
Yet 37 percent of fish caught in West African waters are taken illegally, robbing populations of key stocks like sardinella, anchovies and mackerel, costing the region over $1 billion annually. “Fisheries are a matter of culture and national security for us,” Arthur said.
Senegal and Ghana are not alone. Illegal fishing remains a pervasive scourge from the jeweled waters of remote Pacific atolls to the iceberg fields of Antarctica .
And compared to other extractive sectors, fishing remains opaque. “Fishing has just sort of been left behind,” said Giardini, underscoring how vulnerable the $400 billion industry is to the proliferation of criminality.
“In everything—every community, every regulation, every decision, every management—if there is no transparency, we go in the wrong direction,” said Sarr, warning how West African waters are defenseless against European, Asian and American fleets operating off their coasts.
While Senegal reversed on its early indications of signing the Mombasa Declaration, Sarr remains clear about the need to improve international oversight: “Transparency is something that must be part of the global credo, so that everything people do is legible.”
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The declaration commits to increased accountability through a digitized global vessel registry database, the implementation of unique vessel identifiers for small-scale boats and tracking down the owners profiting from boats caught illegally fishing.
Without greater transparency, existing enforcement sometimes targets the wrong people. “Often the sanction they apply [goes] to the captain or the re…
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