The competition of the festival fishermen of the world, Thursday, March 22, 2018, in Lorient, opened with the projection of a Senegalese film of Thomas Grand and Moussa Diop “Fish of gold, African fish”. It makes us live an exceptional dive in the complexity, the richness and the hardness of the artisanal fishing in Casamance. Thousands of people from all over West Africa converge on this coast at the limit of the descent of the large sardinella banks that frequent the coastal waters of Morocco to Senegal.
They find ways to live or survive in harsh working conditions, at sea and in the smoke of ovens. Men, women and children rub shoulders in a framework that seems chaotic but works in a perfectly organized manner. The film does not hide the complex and sometimes conflicting social relations between fishermen, porters, fishmongers, employees of smokehouses, wood deliverers, transporters. We understand how much fishing is essential for work and food for millions of people in Africa. So the film ends with an anguished call: what will become of them if the rumors about the installation of fishmeal factories materialize? Thousands of people will lose their jobs and millions more will reduce their consumption of cheap and quality protein.
For the moment Senegal still escapes the rush on fishmeal now affecting Mauritania, but already women of M’bour and Joal complain of competition from these factories. They are supposed to work only the garbage and unsalable fish of low quality, but the temptation is strong to run the plant full by catching some of the fish for human consumption. In fact, the price of flour has increased by more than 50% because of the growing demand for feed for aquaculture, while at the same time flour production is shrinking in the rest of the world. Senegalese fishermen are indeed alerted by what is happening in Mauritania.
With the laudable intention of making better use of its catches, the state decided, from 2010, to reduce the activity of foreign pelagic trawlers by increasing the cost of licenses, by pushing these boats off and forcing them to land. their fish in the ports of Mauritania by delivering 2% of the catches to feed a program of sale at very low prices on the domestic market. 60 trawlers were involved, 10 from Western Europe, delivering mostly frozen fish to Africa (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria) and 50 from Russia and Eastern Europe to feed their own markets. Nice initiative can be said, respecting all the canons of justice and responsible fishing. The Mauritanians’ fish distribution program worked well and improved their diet, but these choices turned out to be rather catastrophic.
Each year, 200 to 300 000 tonnes of pelagic (sardinella) fish that were previously sold frozen for human consumption in Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana were diverted to flour mills. There were 5 in 2010, there are 29 in 2016 and 40 authorizations have been signed. These factories are linked to Turkish, Chinese, Moroccan and Russian capital. They run at 28% of their capacity and provide very few direct jobs, less than 1000 for 300 000 T. In Senegal, 150 000 T landed provide 50 000 jobs. In addition, 200 000 T of sardinella processed into flour deprives 40 million Africans of 5 kg of quality fish per person. The only fishermen who benefit are the fishermen of the 200 seine canoes, mainly Senegalese, chartered by the factories to fish an over-exploited resource. The full article by Alain Le Sann is available at: peche-dev.org/spip.php?article181