New boats bring hope to the “sea of misery”

Scaling down: fish numbers have fallen sharply in the Mozambique Channel. Credit: Courtesy Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF-SA)

Mozambique loses $65m a year to illegal fishing. Big money for a small country, but just another a drop in what environmentalists are calling “a sea of misery”.

Up and down the coast of Africa, trawlers from Asia are setting nets that run for kilometres, hauling every form of marine life from the water including dolphins, turtles, prawns and, of course, fish.

Now coastal communities say their catch is so far down, it has hurt the local economy.

No trip to Beira or Maputo is complete without camarões e vinho – shrimps, rice and Portuguese wine — but even prawn stocks have fallen.

A 2013 study showed that of 130 ships fishing between Maputo in the south and Cabo Delgado in the north, 129 were foreign and there are fears that, within a decade, parts of the Mozambique Channel could be all but void of life.

Falling catch

Clement Ndau’s mother was born at Chipinge in Zimbabwe, but his father and grandfather were line and net fishermen north of Marromeu, halfway up the coast of Mozambique.

Here Africa’s fourth-largest river, the Zambezi, forms a delta at the end of a 2500-kilometre journey that starts on the border of Zambia and the DRC, flowing through Zimbabwe and Lake Kariba then on to Cahora Bassa. Finally it reaches the Indian Ocean where silt from the river and churn of the water as it enters the sea stir up nutrients that used to draw huge schools of fish.

Clement, now 52, remembers his grandfather’s boat low in the water under the weight.

“When I was a child the catch ran to some hundreds of kilos on a good day,” he told The Zimbabwean. “My grandfather used to sell some of it here and his sisters and my granny would dry the rest. Then he would send his brothers and my father to Malawi and Rhodesia to sell the dry fish.”

Clement works on the railways but his elder brother continued to fish until last year.

“He is growing old and it is heavy work. But the catch is also down so it takes a lot of effort. It is not like when we were kids.

“We still go fishing on weekends but it’s because we don’t have money to do anything else. We spend time as a family and always catch something, but it’s hard to make a living from the sea.”

The Worldwide Fund for Nature has an office in Cape Town from where John Duncan manages the fund’s marine programme.

“The crisis in our oceans is real,” he says.

“The haul from illegal fishing is estimated to be over $23 billion annually which dwarfs the ivory and rhino horn trade, but the danger is that we don’t see it.

“Images of dehorned rhinos and a drop in elephant numbers are things that people notice and react to. But what happens under the ocean’s surface is hard to see, so thousands of tons of marine life can be removed and most of us wouldn’t know.”

But conservation groups say, while Mr Ndau’s story is not unusual, local fisherman have added to the problem. In the past 50 years, Mozambique’s population has trebled to 24 million in a long, thin country where large numbers live near the coast, competing for a limited number of fish.

Kariba crisis

The same is true inland. Kariba is the world’s largest dam, straddling Zambia and Zimbabwe, its waters stretching back so far that if the wall was in London, the dam would end in Cardiff, capital of Wales.

Kapenta, a small fish from Lake Tanganyika, were introduced in the 1960s and within 10 years they had bred so fast, these “freshwater sardines” as they are sometimes known became a staple food.

In the past decade, a record number of licences have been issued on the lake. Rigs go out after dark, using lights to draw fish to the surface before scooping them into nets, but the average boat is lucky to get 150 kilogrammes of kapenta for a night’s work whereas in 2005 it was four times that.

Back in the ocean, Kenya and South Africa run a war against illegal trawlers and both have a navy capable of chasing the pirates and towing their vessels back to port

Not so Mozambique where a lack of naval craft has given poachers a free hand.

Fleet to back up treaty

Now 27 fishing vessels and patrol boats or “interceptors” built at the French port of Cherbourg and commissioned three years ago by the Maputo government are starting to be deployed, with capacity to man the Channel.

And in June, Mozambique, South Africa and 27 other countries joined a treaty to clamp down on poachers.

It’s called the Port State Measures Agreement, and fishing ships coming to dock in any of the member states will have to be inspected. Those without permits risk being impounded or denied entry to the harbor.

In Zimbabwe, dry fish from Mozambique used to be sold in markets at border towns like Mutare and Chipinge, but the trade has shrunk to nothing, though this also has to do with a collapse of the economy over the past decade. The Mugabe government has been accused of economic neglect in the east of the country which has traditionally supported the opposition.

Mozambique’s new patrol boats can’t restore Zimbabwe, but there is hope they may save the Channel and its marine life.

A deal to pay for the craft has caused headaches for Maputo with allegations of secret funding and corruption in government. But the boats are built to EU standard and were delivered on time and within budget.

Clement Ndau says he would not leave the railways even if the fish return to Marromeu.

“The sea was part if my childhood,” he said. “But for those who fish, I hope they see the full boats we used to know.”

For now, illegal trawlers continue to plague the African coast from Nigeria to Namibia, around the Cape and up the eastern side to Somalia. But the new treaty and a commitment to hunt down poachers may turn the tide.

At least Mozambique now has a chance to join the fight.