Unlicensed foreign trawlers deplete fish stocks

Lifting up a bedraggled tarpaulin on his old wooden boat, Angolan fisherman Manuel Hanuti points to the day's meagre haul of a dozen red snapper and a few sailfish. With paltry catches like this, Hamuti said he would be lucky to make US $100 this month and is seriously worried about his ability to support his family. "We used to make quite a good living from fishing, but now things have become really tough," he told IRIN. The livelihoods of traditional fishermen like Hamuti are under threat as large unregulated foreign boats trawl the once-teeming waters off Angola's coast, plundering fish stocks. "There's simply less for us to fish," Hamuti explained, as he and his colleagues at the Praia dos Pescadores (Fisherman's beach) stood idle. "We can't compete. Our equipment isn't any good, and people who work with motorboats can go further out to sea and much faster than we can in our rowboats," he added. For many people in Benguela, around 500 km south of the capital, Luanda, fishing is the main source of income and employment. The province accounts for 45 percent of national production, landing around 31,000 tonnes per year. The waters were once brimming with all kinds of seafood, but both the quantity and variety have fallen sharply in recent years. "We have the richest fishing zone in Angola but at this moment, stocks are going down," said Amaro Ricardo, economic advisor to the provincial governor. Toze de Sousa runs a three-vessel fishing firm capable of reeling in a daily catch of more than 200 tonnes in a good year. He says big boats from Japan, Korea, Russia and Spain are to blame for depleting reserves and costing fishermen their jobs, and warned that even relatively well-equipped firms like his are feeling the pinch. "The problem is that some of these foreign companies register just one boat but have several coming in. Sometimes they don't even have a licence. The government hasn't been able to control these pirate boats and they've bled the seas dry," de Sousa said. In recent years it was not unheard of for a 120-tonne boat to return to shore with just one or two tonnes of fish on board. "There were some years when we could fish between 100 and 200 tonnes per day, but last year and the year before were really bad for us," he said. There were long periods during 2003 when the firm decided not to send the boats out to sea at all because the daily haul would not cover costs, and his business was almost ruined. "We earned practically nothing – we just kept on working to keep our equipment going and to pay our staff... We didn't make any profits for the entire year," he said. Ricardo, at the provincial governor's office, has heard many stories like this, but says gathering hard data is tricky. "There is one company that used to fish about 30 tonnes a week and now it is fishing just 10. That gives you a rough idea of the scale of the problem, but it's difficult to measure how much money we're losing," he said. "We don't have numbers or statistics, but it does mean that Angolan people are losing jobs." Apart from the direct impact on the fishermen and their families, the reduced stocks – and consequent inflated prices - are also hurting market traders and ordinary consumers. "The cost of fish has rocketed," said local resident Jose Carlos. "Most people in Benguela used to eat a lot of fish, but now we eat much less because it's just too expensive." The country has regulations to ward off the problem of pirates, but in Angola, where authorities are juggling a seemingly endless list of priorities as the country struggles to recover from a 27-year civil war, the problem is implementation. "There are lots of rules about fishing, but we have no infrastructure to control it. There are no ships, no satellites to control people who are fishing in this zone or fishing where it's prohibited," Ricardo said. De Sousa agreed that the lack of capacity to regulate incoming trawlers lay at the heart of the problem. "To really check up on what's going on, the government needs several helicopters and lots of radars and equipment, which they simply can't afford. At the moment they rely on small motor boats, which cannot go very far into the ocean before they have to come back and refuel." Policies needed revamping, but any improvement would be slow. "We have to develop a new strategy, new policies, to discover the cause of this problem. The government is trying to be stricter but it's a step-by-step process," Ricardo said.