快猫短视频

FISHING used to be easy in the waters of the Banc d鈥橝rguin National Park in
Mauritania. 鈥淚n the old days we could see the mullet coming,鈥� says Mohammed ould
Swidi, chief of Iwik village, as he looks out over the waters of the Atlantic.
鈥淲e just walked into the water with our nets to catch them.鈥� Not any more. Not
since the rest of the world got wise to the riches here.

In oceans the world over, fishers have pillaged areas rich with fish. But
that wasn鈥檛 supposed to happen here, because the Banc d鈥橝rguin is Africa鈥檚
largest marine park. Set up in 1976, the park is a huge slab of empty desert
flanked by mudflats and islands that occupies an open bay the size of Cyprus. It
protects the prime breeding and nursery areas for one of the world鈥檚 richest
coastal fishing areas, stretching more than 2000 kilometres from Morocco to
Guinea-Bissau. Its waters are open only to a few dozen local fishing boats
equipped with small nets and sails. The park should have been a flagship for the
growing body of conservationists who see marine parks as the key to protecting
the world鈥檚 surviving fisheries.

Yet the flagship is foundering. The problem? African nations may want to
protect their valuable fish stocks, but their governments feel the need to sell
fish to the rest of the world in order to make money. Also, while the boundaries
of the park may be fixed, the fish stocks are not. As the fish swim in and out
with the seasons, tens of thousands of traditional fishers from all along the
coast lie in wait鈥攁nd beyond them, cruising the horizon, are hundreds of
giant foreign trawlers, whose catch dwarfs that of the traditional fishers. 鈥淚鈥檓
not optimistic about the survival of the fisheries here,鈥� says Pierre Campredon,
a French marine biologist who advises the Mauritanian government on fisheries
management. If he is right, then conservationists worldwide would do well to pay
close attention to the Banc鈥檚 fate. Otherwise hopes for the success of marine
reserves will be dashed.

The Banc鈥檚 vast expanse of shallows and mudflats harbours a cornucopia of
marine life. The park鈥檚 chief scientist, Jean Worms, says it is unique in all
Africa, probably the world. The park鈥檚 large area of shallow water on the shores
of the Sahara desert is certainly special. It gets plenty of sunshine and,
thanks to an adjacent ocean current, it also receives nutrient-rich waters
carried up from the ocean depths. Plankton grows in profusion and seagrasses
spread across the mud. These food sources sustain a complex food chain of fish
and millions of seabirds, including some two million winter migrants from
Europe.

This food chain supports a fishery that is West Africa鈥檚 single most valuable
natural resource. And as other spawning and nursery grounds along the coast have
been lost to coastal development, dams, pollution, trawling and the dynamiting
of reefs, the Banc鈥檚 importance has grown dramatically. A decade ago, only the
people of the park, a clutch of poor desert communities called the Imraguen,
took any interest in its fish. Now, because of overfishing elsewhere, the whole
world does. The waters that border the park send shrimps to Spain, lobster to
Japan, grouper to Portugal, the fins of sharks and rays to Asia, shark meat to
half of Africa and almost anything to Dutch fishmeal factories.

Back in Iwik, Swidi tells me that the mullet have fallen victim to Senegalese
fishers sailing north and fishing on the park boundary after their own fish
stocks collapsed. The early 1990s saw a twentyfold increase in the Mauritanian
mullet catch, thanks to a new market for mullet roe in Europe鈥攚here it
fetches $150 a kilogram. It was this, not fish for their own tables, that
drew these fishers north. Not surprisingly, stocks collapsed. 鈥淎ll our efforts
at conservation were completely cancelled out in just a few years,鈥� says
Campredon.

Now other fish are heading toward the same fate. When the mullet stocks
collapsed, the fishers turned to sharks, with dramatic effect. I watched on the
beach at Iwik earlier this year as villagers gutted a hundred sharks, rays and
guitarfish caught by one boat. A trader had driven 200 kilometres up the beach
from the capital Nouakchott to buy the meat for Ghana. The fins would later be
sold for the soup dishes of Asia. Some species, such as hammerhead and tiger
sharks, are almost gone from these waters. It鈥檚 hardly surprising. Sharks
reproduce slowly compared to other fish. They have long lives, mature slowly and
have few young鈥攚hen they get the chance to breed at all. At Iwik, I saw
dozens of unborn young being cut from the female sharks and thrown aside.

Empty seas

Information on fisheries is hard to come by in West Africa. Marine research
is underfunded and in its infancy. But the marine scientists I spoke to in
Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau are all in agreement. As Cherif ould
Toueilib, director of the Mauritanian government鈥檚 two-year-old fisheries
research bureau, puts it: 鈥淭he cake is getting smaller with more eaters.鈥� Even
without hard numbers it is easy to see that a crisis is developing. Dimas
Santos, who exports fresh Mauritanian grouper, bream and hake to European
restaurants, looks gloomy in his packing plant behind the beach at Nouakchott.
鈥淭he fish just aren鈥檛 in the sea any more. I can only buy half of what I could
get two years ago. We are paying the price of years of overfishing,鈥� he
says.

Many of his suppliers are Senegalese, the most enthusiastic of the local
fishers. From the coastal villages of Senegal, thousands of open motorised
boats, called pirogues, sail the length of the West African coast laden with
boxes of ice to preserve their catch. But their journeys get ever longer because
fish are in shorter and shorter supply. On Hann beach just outside Dakar, the
Senegalese capital, fisherman Bira Gueye says that it now takes him four hours
to reach fish shoals instead of 20 minutes. Many Senegalese fishers go out for a
fortnight at a time, travelling the 600 kilometres to the Banc d鈥橝rguin. But, as
another fisher in Dakar puts it: 鈥淚t鈥檚 worth it. It takes two weeks to catch
here what you can get in a night on the Banc.鈥�

Because the pirogue fishers are so visible, they often bear the brunt of the
blame for declining fish populations鈥攅specially since many stray across
the park boundary to poach in the Banc鈥檚 rich nursery areas. Indeed, the
poachers probably take far more fish than the local villagers. Lamin, a
19-year-old Gambian poacher I met as he waited to reclaim his impounded boat,
boasts he can enter the park with impunity at night. He only got caught when he
lost his bearings and failed to make himself scarce at dawn.

Policing is far from perfect, admits Antonio Araujo, the park鈥檚 conservation
officer. Two of his three patrol boats are out of action, and he has no night
binoculars or searchlights. The radar that scans the seas for ships cannot see
the pirogues because they are too small. But despite the poaching, the fish
catch within the park is a fraction of the harvest just outside. 鈥淧irogue
fishing causes little harm compared with the big trawlers,鈥� says Campredon.

Peering at a radar screen at Mamghar in the south of the park, Araujo points
out the slow-moving white blobs of around 40 large trawlers from Spain, the
Netherlands, Ireland, Japan and China 鈥渇ishing the line鈥� close to the park
boundary. It鈥檚 a fair bet that among them is one of the world鈥檚 largest fishing
vessels, the Irish-owned Atlantic Dawn, which is 144 metres long, has a crew of
60, can hold 7000 tonnes of fish, and is dedicated full-time to Mauritanian
waters. The European Union bought the rights to take 250,000 tonnes of fish a
year from Mauritanian waters鈥攈alf of the foreign take鈥攁nd more in
neighbouring Senegal and Guinea-Bissau. It pays the Mauritanian government one
Euro per kilogram, though the deal is up for renewal. And all told, the 600 or
so foreign trawlers catch 30 times more than the pirogues.

The European Union鈥檚 fisheries policy stipulates that all fishing should be
鈥渟ustainable鈥�, and Kevin McHugh, who owns the giant Atlantic Dawn, does not feel
he is damaging Mauritania鈥檚 prime resource. 鈥淭hose waters down there are alive
with fish,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here are very strict controls. But they like to see us
coming, because we are paying for our investment and there is a direct return to
that state.鈥�

But Callum Roberts of York University, one of the world鈥檚 leading experts on
marine reserves, has a different view. 鈥淔oreign trawlers are strip-mining
African waters of their fisheries resources,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t is a scandal. They
have signed up to international treaties that promise sustainable fishing. But
having failed to do it at home, they are wrecking the future of African
蹿颈蝉丑别谤颈别蝉.鈥�

In theory, decisions about how much fish to take are down to the host
governments. But such is their dependence on fishing that they are under strong
pressure. The fish here provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, especially among
communities who fled to the coast during the great West African droughts of the
1970s and 1980s. They also provide up to 75 per cent of national protein, and,
through the sale of licences to foreign trawlers, up to half of government
revenues. 鈥淭hese countries have big debts. They have to pay it back. Until they
do, they say they cannot refuse the EU,鈥� says Campredon.

While foreign trawlers dominate outside the park, the pirogue fishers they
displace are pressing to be allowed inside. Sid Ahmed ould Abeid, president of
Mauritania鈥檚 National Fisheries Federation, a trade organisation, summed up
their predicament: 鈥淭he fish come into the area from the south, swim into the
park, spend three months there, where only the park villagers can catch them,
and then swim straight out into the deep water where the trawlers get them.鈥� If
the pirogue fishers are to make a living, they need access to the park, he says.
Privately, European park advisers concede that it may be politically impossible
to keep out the pirogues while local fishers have the run of the place. There is
a strong political lobby among rich absentee boat owners in Mauritania who want
to open up access. But, says Araujo, 鈥渋f we did set up a licensing system for
outsiders to come in, we just don鈥檛 have the resources to police it鈥�.

What is to be done? Clearly, fish habitat needs to be protected. The
Mauritanian authorities are setting tougher laws against poachers. And in
Senegal, where many old fish nurseries among the mangroves have been lost and
coral reefs are being dynamited or ripped up by trawlers, the environment
minister Lamine Ba says he wants to create a string of marine parks.

In reserve

Such parks have had a dramatic effect on fish populations elsewhere in the
world, according to a recent detailed study by marine biologists at the National
Center for Ecological Analysis at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Even small reserves can rapidly double fish populations, increase fish size by
30 per cent and triple the amount of offspring, says Bob Warner, an ecologist at
the centre.

But most researchers believe that for such reserves to be effective, there
cannot be any fishing within the area. Even a small amount of fishing will tend
to pick off the biggest fish, which produce the most eggs, having a
disproportionate effect. 鈥淔ull protection is essential,鈥� says Roberts. One way
forward for the Banc d鈥橝rguin, he suggests, would be to identify key spawning
grounds within the park and ban all fishing within those areas鈥攁 kind of
reserve within a reserve.

And by themselves even the best parks aren鈥檛 sufficient to save a troubled
fishery like that of the Banc, says Roberts. 鈥淢arine protected areas are not a
solution here. Not until the trawlers issue is tackled, anyway.鈥� They only work
in the context of a wider conservation framework. If, as at the Banc, hundreds
of trawlers are 鈥渇ishing the line鈥� on the edge of the protected area, then they
have little chance.

Fixing the trawler problem won鈥檛 be easy. West Africa badly needs foreign
revenue from fishing. But trawlers are not the only route to that. Santos
believes the future should lie in line-fishing small numbers of high quality
(and therefore high-priced) fish for sale to European markets and restaurants.
Sport fishing may also play a role. High-rolling tourists spend a lot of money,
but take only a few fish. They are already cruising in small numbers among the
picturesque mangrove-fringed islands of Guinea-Bissau. There, in waters too
shallow for big trawlers, they fish in small boats with rod and line. 鈥淟ast
night I had a dream about bream,鈥� drawled one American over breakfast at the
Tubaron Club on Rubane Island. Such dreams could also prove lucrative among the
islands of the Banc d鈥橝rguin.

Where does all this leave the pirogue fishers? They are the ones who must
live in the region. Campredon believes that if they can get rights to a greater
share of the catch, it may give them the long-term interest needed to manage the
fisheries better. 鈥淭hey are the key figures, the primary managers of ecosystems
and their resources. It is only by working with them and helping to address
their concerns that we will be able to better manage the coastal zone,鈥� he
says.

But whether such responsibility is possible in a global marketplace is less
clear. On the beaches from Hann to Iwik, the local residents have to fish to
live. And market forces will encourage them to go fishing, however empty the
seas. Fish in the markets behind Hann beach fetch 20 times what they did a
generation ago. There may no longer be plenty more fish in the sea,
but鈥攆or the moment at least鈥攖here is still money to be made.

The brutal logic seems clear. If the trawlers keep up their 鈥渟trip-mining鈥�,
and if the current free-for-all persists, it will continue to be every fisher
for himself. And as scarcity pushes prices up, the park will succumb, and nobody
will stop till the last fish is gone. It happened on the Grand Banks of Canada.
It can happen again.