A story snip by John Briley from the TRUST: Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing takes millions of tons of fish from the ocean each year, harming the environment—and the livelihoods of legitimate fishermen around the world. Just after dawn in the busy fishing village of Elmina, Ghana, andresidents are gathering on a bridge overlooking the town’s harbor to issue their daily fishing report. As the sun rises over low-slung roofs, the boats begin streaming in—burly, colorful canoes up to 140 feet long, each hull carved from a single tree. Locals clap as each catch-laden canoe passes below the bridge. The bigger the haul, the louder the applause.
These days, there’s not much clapping. After a full night of fishing, canoes float back to Elmina—whose 33,000 residents are bunched along a sweeping coastline about 100 miles west of Ghana’s capital, Accra—bearing just a smattering of fish, a fraction of a night’s average catch from a decade ago. Elmina, among the largest of the dozens of artisanal fishing communities in Ghana, is not alone. Throughout West Africa and the rest of the developing world, coastal enclaves, whose fates are tied to the sea, are reeling because of rapidly declining fisheries. One major reason for the depletion: large-scale illegal, unreported and unregulated, or IUU, fishing by foreign vessels that roam the seas, poaching fish by the ton with little regard for the law, the commercial fishermen who obey it, or the harm they’re causing the world’s waters.
“We are supposed to be in bumper season,” says Jojo Solomon, 52, a lifelong fisherman who served as the elected Chief Fisherman of Elmina. The annual upwelling of cold water in August has historically brought swarms of herring and other pelagic fish to the surface and into waiting nets. “But the catch is low, and it has been going down every year for the past 10 years.”
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