Swedish Society for Nature Conservation organised a lunch seminar earlier this week on securing sustainable social-ecological fisheries in West Africa.
Beatrice Gorez, coordinator for Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements (CFFA) based in Brussels and Gaoussou Gueye, Secretary General for CAOPA, discussed how they are working together towards securing food security in Senegal. They touched upon how to handle and prevent large scale fishing fleets, such as from the EU fishing in waters off the Senegalese coast, from contributing to overfishing and thus jeopardise national food security.
Transparency, not only within national fisheries but also on fishing agreements with other countries fishing in Senegalese waters, is a key element for moving towards sustainable fisheries in Senegal as well as other developing countries. In addition of the urgent need for transparency within the fishing sector, CFFA emphasise the need of putting fishing issues on the agenda and making it a national issues as a key step towards sustainable social-ecological fisheries in developing countries. Some of these issues will be discussed under the external dimensions under the new CFP.