War, fish, and foreign fleets: The marine fisheries catches of Sierra Leone 1950–2015

Seto, Katherine; Belhabib, Dyhia; Mamie, Josephus; Copeland, Duncan; Vakily, J.M.; Seilert, Heiko; Baio, Andrew; Harper, Sarah; Zeller, Dirk; Zylich, K.; Pauly, Daniel

doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2017.05.036

Cited by 26 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The Ebola crisis along with governance issues related to the cancelation of the World Bank project, a major contributor to the increase in MCS in 2012 and 2013, prompted low to virtually no monitoring after 2014. We interpolated the number of boats between 2012 and 2014 and then multiplied by a minimum CPUE of 446 t•boat −1 •year −1 for the industrial fleet operating in Sierra Leone (Seto et al, 2015).…”

Section: Sierra Leonementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The unregulated catch was estimated using the number of vessels that were caught while committing an unregulated fishing act such as illegal transshipment, fishing in a prohibited zone, using illegal mesh size, etc. multiplied by the minimum regional CPUE of 446 t•boat −1 •year −1 (Seto et al, 2015). This provides a rather highly conservative estimate since only those who were caught are taken into consideration in the analysis.…”

Section: Economic Lossmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Assessing the Effectiveness of Monitoring Control and Surveillance of Illegal Fishing: The Case of West Africa

Doumbouya¹,

Camara²,

Mamie³

et al. 2017

Front. Mar. Sci.

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104

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This paper assesses illegal fishing in West Africa, one of the regions most affected by Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing (IUU) in the world. The catch, the economic loss and the amount recovered through Monitoring, Control, and Surveillance (MCS) are calculated based on a reconstruction method, and the information made available through national MCS units, between 2010 and 2016 in an effort to assess the effectiveness of surveillance efforts in the region. Results show considerable loss of revenues for Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, estimated at 2.3 billion USD annually, while a minimal amount of 13 million USD is recovered through MCS. In addition, this paper finds that countries touched by the Ebola crisis (Guinea and Sierra Leone) drive a tremendous increase in the loss generated by illegal fishing. However, further analysis shows that the overall severity of illegal fishing, as defined by a range of types investigated here, declines as the fines against the most severe forms of IUU fishing increase. Finally this study finds that Sierra Leone and The Gambia have the highest scoring MCS systems, and were the countries where the most offenders are caught and charged with the highest fines, while Senegal's new legislations which improved MCS during 2015 does not appear to show on the scoring results. This study finds that illegal fishing amounts the equivalent of 65% of the legal reported catch from West Africa and poses serious concern for food security, and the economy in the region.

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Section: Sierra Leonementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Economic Lossmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the Effectiveness of Monitoring Control and Surveillance of Illegal Fishing: The Case of West Africa

Doumbouya¹,

Camara²,

Mamie³

et al. 2017

Front. Mar. Sci.

Self Cite

104

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, in western Africa, local communities rely on seafood as protein, and locally caught fish are important culturally (Golden et al, 2016;Russell, 2017). Given the lack of robust stock assessment in these countries (Seto et al, 2017), determining catch statistics (i.e., such as monitoring CPUE as discussed above) or the state of the stocks fished by a majority of artisan and nearshore fishers is difficult. However, these same fish stocks have long been targeted by foreign fishers, often operating illegally further offshore (Payne, 1976;Greenpeace, 2015;Seto et al, 2017).…”

Section: Sustainable Fisheries and Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

Sustainability: A flawed concept for fisheries management?

Stafford

2019

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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The concept of sustainable fishing is well ingrained in marine conservation and marine governance. However, I argue that the concept is deeply flawed; ecologically, socially and economically. Sustainability is strongly related, both historically and currently, to maximum long-term economic exploitation of a system. Counter-intuitively, in fisheries, achieving this economic exploitation often relies on government subsidies. While many fish populations are not sustainably fished biologically, even ‘sustainably harvesting’ fish results in major ecological changes to marine systems. These changes create unknown damage to ecosystem processes, including carbon capture potential of the ocean. The spatial scale of commercial fishing processes can also lead to social and food security issues in local, coastal communities that rely on fish for dietary needs. A radical alternative proposal is provided to the current situation. Ultimately, offshore fishing should be stopped completely and fish catches should rely instead on inshore fisheries. While such an approach may require a change in thinking and human behaviour regarding fish, I demonstrate that there are many benefits of this approach, including ecological, social and to local coastal economies, and few negatives, although management measures and coastal marine protected areas to protect vulnerable species and habitats would still be required. As such, the approach suggested is much more akin to a holistic definition of sustainability or ‘prevention of ecological harm’, rather than the maximum long-term exploitation of an ecosystem which is an underlying assumption of much fisheries and conservation research. While the suggestions in the study would benefit from further ecological, social and economic modelling, any movement towards restricting offshore catches should provide some degree of the benefits detailed.

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“…Distant water fleets have enabled some countries to diversify their catch and satisfy demand using resources from international waters or the Exclusive Economic Zone's (EEZ) of other countries (Belhabib, Greer, & Pauly, 2017;Pauly et al, 2013;Seto et al, 2017). Access to these waters is usually obtained through joint ventures or through third-party access agreements with central governments, which often lack support for sustainable fishing practices.…”

Section: Demand and Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconstructing overfishing: Moving beyond Malthus for effective and equitable solutions

et al. 2017

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Inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis of the root causes of overfishing can lead to misguided and ineffective fisheries policies and programmes. The “Malthusian overfishing narrative” suggests that overfishing is driven by too many fishers chasing too few fish and that fishing effort grows proportionately to human population growth, requiring policy interventions that reduce fisher access, the number of fishers, or the human population. By neglecting other drivers of overfishing that may be more directly related to fishing pressure and provide more tangible policy levers for achieving fisheries sustainability, Malthusian overfishing relegates blame to regions of the world with high population growth rates, while consumers, corporations and political systems responsible for these other mediating drivers remain unexamined. While social–ecological systems literature has provided alternatives to the Malthusian paradigm, its focus on institutions and organized social units often fails to address fundamental issues of power and politics that have inhibited the design and implementation of effective fisheries policy. Here, we apply a political ecology lens to unpack Malthusian overfishing and, relying upon insights derived from the social sciences, reconstruct the narrative incorporating four exemplar mediating drivers: technology and innovation, resource demand and distribution, marginalization and equity, and governance and management. We argue that a more nuanced understanding of such factors will lead to effective and equitable fisheries policies and programmes, by identifying a suite of policy levers designed to address the root causes of overfishing in diverse contexts.

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War, fish, and foreign fleets: The marine fisheries catches of Sierra Leone 1950–2015

Cited by 26 publications

References 28 publications

Assessing the Effectiveness of Monitoring Control and Surveillance of Illegal Fishing: The Case of West Africa

Assessing the Effectiveness of Monitoring Control and Surveillance of Illegal Fishing: The Case of West Africa

Sustainability: A flawed concept for fisheries management?

Reconstructing overfishing: Moving beyond Malthus for effective and equitable solutions

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