For thousands of coastal Ghanaians, artisanal fishing is a livelihood difficult to replace.
Centenary Cidi Ocloo, who has been fishing for 17 years, says the activity is much more than just a way to make ends meet. The sea and the three landing beaches in Ghana’s Keta district have become permanent fixtures in his life.
“I used to follow my father and his siblings to the shores as a child,” Ocloo tells Dialogue Earth. “There were times I would join them during hauling or simply swim while they worked.”
As Ocloo grew up he began coming every day to fish with other children and to help sort the catch.
“It was fun and still is,” he says. Nowadays, though, it can be a tough way to earn a living. Nets are increasingly brought in without fish, just holding garbage and sand. “There are days we haul an empty net,” says Ocloo.
He adds that any cuttlefish eggs trapped in his net are returned to the sea immediately. This follows some local education on protecting cuttlefish given by the chief fisher at his landing beach.
Ghana runs on seafood
The average Ghanaian eats 20-25 kg of fish a year, higher than the global average of 20 kg and many other West African nations.
To supply the catch, the country has a sizeable fishing industry, including scores of trawlers and industrial vessels. But it’s small-scale artisanal fishers that are the backbone of the sector. They put to sea in more than 12,700 canoes, operating out of nearly 200 fishing villages, using beach seine, lobster, gill and purse seine nets.
These artisanal fishers produce about 70% of the marine fish landed in Ghana, according to a 2023 paper. And around three-quarters of all the fish landed are consumed in country.
The fishing industry transcends nutrition and commerce in Ghana, serving as a cornerstone of social and cultural identity in coastal areas like Tema, Takoradi and Chorkor.
The sea governs the daily existence of people here, acting less like a simple resource and more like a generational legacy that fosters communal unity.
This precious resource has been under pressure for a long time. A 2015 research paper found that contrary to the rules, almost all artisanal and industrial vessels operate in the shallow parts of the coast. These practices have degraded breeding sites and depleted fishery resources, the paper says.
To make matters worse, Ghana’s fishers could be throwing away over a million US dollars’ worth of potential seafood annually by catching and discarding tiny, early-life-stage organisms before they can grow to sellable size.
That’s what a six-month study of the country’s beach seine net fisheries has found. It investigated catches on three landing beaches in Ghana, including Dzelukofe where Ocloo fishes.
Bycatch problems
Beach seines are a popular fishing gear along the coast. These nets are set in the water with a canoe and then hauled in from the shore.
The gear consists of two lines to be pulled in, two wings of net and a “cod end” in the middle. The wings have floats at the top and lead weights at the bottom, so the net hangs from the water’s surface down to the seabed.
The net is set in a curve by the canoe and hauled in by a team of upwards of 20 people. This leaves enclosed fish no option but to swim into the cod end as the net is usually hauled along the seabed, dragging along anything in its way.
Beach seines in Ghana can catch a lot of fish. They also catch quite a lot of garbage, plastics, sand, seaweed and anything else within the area the net is dragged through.
Everything besides the fish is left on the shores to dry out or rot. But often, nestled among this detritus, are eggs and tiny invertebrates, too small to be noticed by most people.
Margaret Fafa Akwetey has noticed.
The lecturer at Ghana’s University of Cape Coast led the six-month study into beach seining. She and her team found thousands of animals discarded from many different species. Three-quarters of the discards were juveniles or early life stages of species that are commercially important, such as cuttlefish, bivalves and crustaceans.
“Some 80 species [and] 20,545 individuals were recorded during the dry season,” Akwetey says. “While 75 species comprising 8,351 individuals were recorded during the wet season.”
Extrapolating from these figures, Akwetey estimates that some 8 million cuttlefish eggs may have been discarded through beach seining along Ghana’s 550 km coastline between August 2022 and February 2023.
“And when you want to translate this into organisms, considering natural mortality and every form of mortality, you are still looking at over 80,000 organisms that could have grown into a lot of cuttlefish,” she tells Dialogue Earth.
In her paper, she estimates the tonnes of lost potential adult cuttlefish could have generated USD 800,000 locally and USD 1.9 million in export.
Beach seining happens throughout the week on 315 landing beaches in Ghana, with most communities only pausing on Tuesdays. Apart from during closed seasons, “there’s fishing as long as the weather is good. Therefore, we are discarding many organisms,” says Akwetey.
Complicating the issue, many of the animals found in the study were attached to plastics. Clams had attached themselves to bottles, lids or polythene. Eggs were attached to plastic debris of all kinds as well as found in the sand.
“Fish, clams etcetera typically cling to rocks, macroalgae, reefs and other organisms … However, if we do not have a lot of [these] in the marine ecosystem, these organisms will attach to other things,” Akwetey says.
Ghana seeks to protect fish, and fishers
Ghana’s fish populations have long been under pressure from illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The problem reached such levels that the EU issued a second yellow card warning to the country in 2021, saying it might restrict trade with Ghana if things do not improve.
Straightforward overfishing has also been a problem. Ghana first implemented a ban for trawlers in 2016 that was extended in 2019 to include artisanal fishers. Last year, industrial trawlers were banned for all of July and August, semi-industrial inshore vessels for July, while artisanal canoe fishers were exempted. In January of this year, the government announced it was again considering exempting artisanal fishers, who have long complained about its impact on their livelihoods.
Ocloo says there is always a “bumper harvest” after the closed season, but artisanal fishers like him struggle when they are part of the closure. Although he believes it should be maintained to protect fish stocks.
Seth Kedey, public relations officer of the Ghana National Canoe Fishermen Council, says there are more efforts afoot to protect fisheries and those who rely on them in the district of Keta where he works.
“Here in Keta, we place moratoriums on new canoes to reduce overfishing and protect juveniles and marine biodiversity,” he tells Dialogue Earth. “We are in a discussion with the government to declare a portion of the marine area as a marine protected area.”
Reducing bycatch could also help Ghana’s ocean life. But while fishers at Dzelukofe landing beach are aware of the impact, their peers elsewhere in Keta and in the Central region’s Cape Coast are less so.
Akwetey suggests awareness-raising campaigns could be a win for fishers and the environment.
Fishers know it is illegal to harvest sea turtles and return them if they are trapped in their nets, she points out. “Let’s employ the same strategy to persuade them to put the bycatch back into the ocean.”
