Africa is a continent with large populations living in deep poverty so the use of natural resources to feed the local people is vitally important. In an ideal world all nations would be self sustaining but even more so in Africa. Many of the African nations have a huge level of natural resources they can use to their advantage such as oil, minerals, coffee, tea etc to export. But producing enough food in arid climates or even in equatorial forest is very tough.
Two-thirds of African countries have some kind of coastline and some use it for not only tourism but also the fishing industry. However the productivity of African waters is dropping and fishing stocks are shrinking rapidly. Sadly his is a familiar story for fisherman here in the UK. Kenyan fishermen are now catching a tenth of the numbers of fish that they were catching twenty or thirty years ago which is having a huge impact on the fishing industry. It is not only Kenya though but across the coastal waters around Africa with several species becoming extinct in over-fished areas. Even in the teeming waters off South Africa the fishing industry is reporting significant drops in catch over the past few decades.
The problem is pretty much the same as in European waters with overfishing and pollution to blame. However the problem in African waters is that there seems to be no co-operation to try and control fishing levels and allow stocks to replenish. Which is understandable when the countries are facing such poverty and famine from drought inland. The African Union has tried to fight overfishing with joint navy patrols and co-operation between fisheries but have failed so far. Even governments are not all keen on the idea of quotas. They are not exactly popular with our fishermen either!
Much needed marine research is being hindered by lack of funding and the continent has only one large oceanography department, at the University of Cape Town, and even that is crucially underfunded. Education is at the core of a responsible fishing industry and trying to stamp out illegal fishing methods such as ground trawling, dynamiting and light-lure fishing is proving difficult.
However, generally local fishing fleets remain small scale and less of a problem than industrial size fishing operations. Frequently the problem is down to foreigners fishing on an industrial scale in African waters. The ever increasing demand for food production across the world means that many other nations have been moving into African waters in order to fish on a large scale. The EU and China have both bought fishing rights in African waters as have the Russians. The fishing rights are easy money for unscrupulous governments and these make it almost impossible to reduce quotas or if they do they impact on the local fishermen rather than the international fishing companies.
Perhaps the answer is to create more protected national marine parks. This could work as it would allow fish stocks to recover in these areas and they could also prove to be huge tourism draws. In Kenya the coral reefs are so over fished that it now rare indeed to spot a shark so heavily have they been fished for the Chinese markets.
