Field Story
Threatened Fisheries Within the Global 200 Marine Ecoregions









Mauritania's fish-rich waters are getting crowded. Environmentalists, politicians and fishers are fighting the responsible partnersCthe EU, Mauritania and the latest visitors, a fleet of Dutch supertrawlers.

By Lesa Griffith         


"This has been a bad year for tuna in the waters off northern Spain," says veteran fishing boat captain Paulo Muñoz, based at Porto Naos on Lanzarote, Canary Islands. "Normally that means fishing will be good down here, but I haven't caught one tuna." He shakes his head as his crew prepares the artisanal fishing boat Zeruka Argia for a long-distance trip to Mauritanian waters in hopes of something finally biting the lines. "My catch for all species, but especially tuna, has dropped over the last seven years." Is he worried? Muñoz blows air through his closed lips and raises his hands in exasperation: "We're not making any money!"

A few hundred kilometres away, Nouadhibou, Mauritania's oldest deepwater port, is really just a beach curving around a deep bay where hundreds of boats are anchored. It is like a scene out of Mad Max. The bay is littered with shipwrecks and rotting boats of all sizes are abandoned on the sand. The air is filled with the smell of the dead fish strewn on the beach. "Is this a symbol of the future of fishing?" asks Arnau Mateu, fisheries campaigner for Greenpeace Spain, who recently visited Nouadhibou. Mauritania's fishing industry started only 25 years ago, when the market for copper and iron collapsed and a severe drought shattered agriculture, leaving the country desperate for revenue. In the last 45 years, foreign vessels, or distant water fishing fleets, caught an estimated 80 percent of the fish taken from West African waters. The coastal nations took home the remaining 20 percent. And their share may get smaller.

On the Mauritanian waters between Puerto Naos, the Canary Islands' primary port, and Nouadhibou, seven Dutch supertrawlers (giant floating fish factories) have been dragging their mammoth nets behind them since January.  The mouths of the nets are wide enough to scoop up three Statues of Liberty laid end to end. The ships haul in an average 3,500 tons of fish in less than a month. They are targeting sadinella and horse mackerel using high-tech fish-searching methods, such as satellites. But one trawler landed an astounding 72,000 kilos of tuna in less than 20 days as bycatch, reported an inside source at Puerto de la Luz, where the fleet is based.

The arrival of the seven supertrawlers, owned by the Dutch marketing conglomerate "The Group", in Mauritania's rich waters, one of the world's most productive marine regions thanks to upwellings in which phytoplankton thrive, is a sure sign of the state of the world's fisheries. The Group, made up of four factory trawler companies, thwarted by the dropping fishing quotas in EU waters, and unsuccessful at trying to enter into herring fishing in US waters off New England, has set its sights on one of the last fishing frontiers. It's ships are based in the Canary Islands and buy monthly licenses from Mauritania to fish its already crowded waters. Mauritania's waters, the country's Exclusive Economic Zone, usually swarms with pelagic fish species such as sardines and tuna, and was once a mecca for fishermen after octopus.  But with Mauritania lacking adequate resources to enforce its own fishing regulations, it's hard to tell how long the goose will keep laying golden eggs.


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