Ivory Coast officials say its own seafood catches went down 30 percent last year, and some experts estimate that illegal catches along West African coasts, mostly by European or Asian vessels, amount to as much as one billion dollars annually.
According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, an NGO based in London, as many as 60 percent of the fishing vessels off Guinea’s coast are unlicensed. Jeanson Djobo Anvran, the director of the agency that regulates fishing in the Ivory Coast, reports that the foreign ships are well equipped and very large, appearing at night near the coast with as many as 2,000 sailors.
He added that the illegal trawlers are of all nationalities, but said he could not name them since they were “so many”.
The European Union has regulations limiting their own fishermen’s activities in these waters to what is allowed in treaties between the Union and the African states, but NGOs claim that lax enforcement, particularly in ports on the Canary Islands, makes it easy to mix illegal catches with legal, thereby transgressing the rules.
In the case of the Ivory Coast, Anvran points out that there simply are not enough resources, or coordination, to protect such a vast stretch of very rich fishing waters, 5,000 kilometres from Mauritania to Angola, and that international cooperation is needed.
The U.S. military command for Africa is running training programs for West African navies and coast guards to combat piracy and illegal fishing, but there is a constant lack of boats and a shortage of money for fuel.