Gambia relies on NGOs to control illegal fishing practices
More than eighty percent of the world's wild fish stocks have collapsed. International demand for seafood has doubled since the 1960s, exceeding what we can sustainably fish. As a result, larger fishing vessels are increasingly encroaching on the waters of smaller nations.
Gambia is a small West African country that remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Its fish stocks are no longer able to withstand industrial fishing. The fish that Gambians depend on for survival are rapidly disappearing due to illegal overfishing by larger nations.
An aerial view of the Gambian coastline
The latest United Nations Human Development Index, which measures a country's poverty level, ranks Gambia 174th out of 189 countries assessed. According to the UN World Food Programme, food insecurity in Gambia has increased from five to eight percent in the last five years, due to droughts, floods and poor use of natural resources such as fish stocks.
But in September 2019, James Gomez, the country's fisheries minister, said fishing was thriving in Gambia. The fishing industry was the largest employment sector in the country, he added, citing 411 deck workers, 155 observers on fishing boats watching for violations, and dozens working in fishmeal factories.
Gomez also said that Gambian waters have enough fish to sustain themselves five times over. "The boats do not take more than a sustainable amount," he assured.
Aerial view of a Gambian fishing boat with Gambian fishermen
The claim seemed dubious to me. Marine scientists often compare counting fish to counting trees, except that the former move and are largely invisible. Therefore, assessing the state of a country's fish stocks is not a clear-cut science.
Few researchers have highlighted the flaws in fisheries science data better than Daniel Pauly, a biologist at the University of British Columbia's Institute of Oceans and Fisheries. He has worked for more than two decades to challenge official statistics, using thousands of sources to try to create a more accurate picture of what is being taken from the oceans.
In one study, he found that global catches, which had been steadily increasing since the 1950s, began to decline in the 1980s. However, China reported increasing catches, with the impossible figure of eleven million tons per year. This was at least double what Pauly said was scientifically possible. The figures gave international organizations that monitor ocean health the wrong impression that fish stocks were far more robust than was actually the case. Pauly soon found the reason for the distorted statistics: when production increased, Chinese government officials were promoted. As a result, production increased, at least in the statistics.
Ad Corten, a Dutch fisheries biologist, added that calculating fish stocks is even more difficult in places like West Africa, where virtually no one does the counting.
Countries in the region lack the resources to properly analyze their stocks, Corten said. Many politicians are closely linked to fishmeal companies because so much money is at stake - and Gambia is the worst country of all. The Fisheries Ministry barely tracks how much fish is landed by licensed vessels, let alone unlicensed ones.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has a working group that looks at fishmeal in West Africa. "But their work is basically dead," he said. "I know this because I am the coordinator of the group."
Still, I wanted to know what Gambia was doing to monitor the state of its waters. Thinking that the local government might be doing what Carten said the United Nations and other international groups aren't, I contacted a fisheries official named Amadou Jallow. He told me that his ministry doesn't conduct its own patrols because it doesn't have boats. But the Gambian government is working with an international marine conservation group called Sea Shepherd, which has secretly brought in a 184-foot vessel called the Sam Simon to combat illegal activity in the waters. Their goal, they told me, is to catch unlicensed foreign vessels that local fisheries had been complaining about for years for plundering national waters. So I joined their patrol for three weeks in August 2019.
Sea Shepherd's vehicle, a 184-foot vessel named Sam Simon
The Sam Simon, named after the creator of the television series The Simpsons, who donated money to Sea Shepherd to purchase the vessel, was built for aggressive pursuit. The vessel had double reinforced sides to enable Sea Shepherd to carry out its controversial ramming tactics against Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean. The vessel is also ideal for patrolling as it is unusually fast and has extra fuel capacity that allows it to stay at sea for long periods. In recent years, Sea Shepherd has worked with various African governments, including Gabon, Liberia, Tanzania, Benin and Namibia, to combat illegal fishing.
Some fisheries experts have criticized these collaborations as publicity stunts designed to further Sea Shepherd's fundraising goals, even though its work has led to the arrest of more than 50 illegal fishing vessels. The patrols have also been criticized as potentially short-sighted.
"While Sea Shepherd can help in the short term, it is not sustainable for countries to rely on expensive Western NGOs to monitor their waters. They need to build the necessary architecture and systems of governance so they can do this themselves," says Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation, which also works with fishing communities affected by illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in West Africa.
The same Gambian government that benefited from the press surrounding its maritime patrols with Sea Shepherd may be ignoring labor and environmental law violations by the same foreign fishing interests on land, Trent added.
Still, I was eager to find out if Sea Shepherd could catch any more of these rogue vessels off the coast of Gunjur, and was given permission to join the crew of the Sam Simon on patrol. The circle of secrecy surrounding our mission was tight. Sea Shepherd staff told me that barely a dozen local government officials had been informed of the patrol.
Ian climbs down into a Sea Shepherd speedboat manned by officers from the Gambian Navy and the Fisheries Authority
For Sea Shepherd, it's about more than just justice or protecting a dying fish species. It's about giving teeth to the half-hearted enforcement of laws on the high seas. But even to call those laws half-hearted would be giving them more credit than they deserve. At sea, the laws are as opaque as water lines are blurry, and most governments have neither the resources nor the interest to chase after illegal actors.
To avoid detection by the fishing boats, Sea Shepherd had, under cover of darkness, brought several small speedboats to a hidden dock, where they sat ready to take a dozen heavily armed Gambian naval and fishing officers onto the Sam Simon. Also on board were two hired Israeli security personnel from a company called Yamasec, who trained the Gambian officers in military procedures for boarding vessels, including those that refused to stop.
The mood aboard the Sam Simon was calm, even sleepy. Crew members spent most of their time scrubbing rust off the deck and thoroughly cleaning the mess hall, while officers on the bridge, hunched over computer screens, monitored the many ships fishing or transiting Gambian waters. Meanwhile, Israeli security officers trained Gambian Navy officers on how to carry their weapons while climbing rope ladders, how to check the ships for contraband, weapons or hidden workers, and how to board moving vessels that refused to stop.
For the first few days, the Sam Simon stayed hidden, trying to avoid detection by Gambian or foreign fishing boats. Whenever fishing vessels inadvertently approached, as the real-time satellite images showed, we quickly moved well out of range of their radars or line of sight. The point of this game of hide and seek was to spring into action as soon as a fishing vessel entered the forbidden zone. By the third day, however, it was clear that our cover had been blown.
Most days, foreign trawlers could be seen from land in abundance, fishing illegally within the zone reserved for local fishing, which extends nine miles from the coast. Instead, the foreign trawlers were now staying well outside the prohibited waters. The captain of the Sam Simon decided to change his plans. Instead of focusing on the unlicensed vessels near shore, the crew would begin conducting unannounced at-sea inspections of the 55 vessels that had a license to stay in Gambian waters, most of which were fishing for herring, which they then sold to local factories.
Less than an hour later, we were alongside the Lu Lao Yuan Yu 010, a 134-foot trawler operated by a Chinese company called Qingdao Tangfeng Ocean Fishery. A team of Gambian officers from the Sam Simon, AK-47 rifles slung over their shoulders, soon scurried up a rope ladder and hoisted themselves onto the deck. Nascimento and I followed close behind. On board the Lu Lao Yuan Yu 010 were seven Chinese officers and 39 crew members (35 Senegalese and 4 Gambians).
Sea Shepherd speedboats next to a Chinese fishing vessel in Gambian waters
Most of the Africans worked below deck on a cramped assembly line, standing shoulder to shoulder, wearing stained and ill-fitting overalls, and flailing their arms against the silvery stream of fish flowing down a conveyor belt to be sorted and packed into boxes for freezing. While the Gambian officers grilled the ship's captain, they also checked his papers.
A Gambian naval lieutenant named Modou Jallow had discovered that the ship's fishing log was empty. All captains are required to keep detailed logbooks to document where they go, how long they work, what equipment they use and what they catch. The lieutenant had issued an arrest warrant for the violation and shouted in Chinese at Captain Qui, who was burning with anger. The captain shouted: "Nobody keeps that!"
The captain was not wrong. Paperwork violations were easy to commit, especially on fishing boats operating along the coast of West Africa, where countries were not always clear about their rules. Fishing boat captains also tended to look suspiciously at logbooks in order to bribe officials and convince conservationists fixated on closing fishing grounds.
The lack of proper logbooks goes to the heart of the problem in The Gambia. They are essential for keeping track of how many fish are left in the country's waters. Scientists typically rely on biological studies, academic modeling, and mandatory reports from land-based fishmongers to assess the health of fish stocks. But researchers also use logbooks to assess fishing locations, descriptions of fishing gear, water depths, timelines, and "effort"—how long nets and lines are compared to the amount caught at sea.
When trying to estimate the size of the remaining herring stock in the Gambia, it means one thing if a boat could land two tons of the fish in a day, and quite another if the job took a week. The naval lieutenant ordered the captain to take his ship back to port.
An hour later, the Lu Lao Yuan Yu 010 was on its way to shore. Over the next two weeks, the Sam Simon, with the help of the private security companies, inspected 15 foreign fishing vessels licensed to fish in Gambian waters and arrested 14 of them. All but one were charged with, among other things, failure to keep proper fishing logbooks.
Author: Ian Urbina
Photo credit: Fábio Nascimento / The Outlaw Ocean Project.