{"id":40077051,"date":"2019-01-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/china-dialogue-ocean-staging.darkbluehq.com\/uncategorized\/5984-foreign-trawling-west-africa\/"},"modified":"2022-02-10T23:00:48","modified_gmt":"2022-02-10T17:30:48","slug":"5984-foreign-trawling-west-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/ocean\/5984-foreign-trawling-west-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Is foreign trawling benefiting West Africa?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coastal and island countries are increasingly looking to the sea to provide food and jobs for their growing populations in an uncertain global economy. Roughly one third<\/a> of the world\u2019s assessed fish stocks are considered overfished. Experience shows that well-managed ocean fisheries can provide large economic benefits. In fact, the World Bank estimates that ocean fisheries could provide US$83 billion more each year if better managed.<\/p>\n

Many poorer coastal and island countries try to make money by selling access to their fish-abundant waters to companies from richer countries with large fishing fleets<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"Such arrangements are widespread. An effort to track industrial fishing vessels, reported in the Science Advances <\/em>journal in August, found that\u00a078% of large-scale fishing<\/a>\u00a0in the waters of lower-income countries was carried out by vessels\u00a0registered in higher-income nations.<\/p>\n

Done well, these arrangements can contribute significantly to the development of lower-income countries. Since 2009, some Pacific Island countries have negotiated contracts for access to tuna stocks at least partially under their jurisdiction. The fees paid by foreign fishing companies increased public revenues in these nations\u00a0by several hundred million dollars<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 at least a five-fold increase.<\/p>\n

Arrangements where one country with jurisdiction over fish resources enters into trade with others that have fleets to harvest them can be \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad\u201d deals for one or both of the parties, in economic terms. Of course, fish stocks have greater value than economics can measure, but using a trade lens allows governments, particularly finance agencies, to assess foreign fishing arrangements.<\/p>\n

The West African situation<\/h2>\n

My colleagues (at Duke University, the World Bank and independent consulting firms) and I have examined foreign fishing arrangements<\/a> off the coast of West Africa, where foreign trawlers have fished for decades. We wanted to help West African governments answer a basic question: in economic terms, is foreign trawling along their coasts a good or bad deal for them?<\/p>\n

Coastal fish stocks in West Africa are economically valuable, and have been targeted for centuries by local small-scale fishers. It has been reported<\/a> that foreign industrial fleets benefit from fisheries at the expense of West African countries<\/a> and their local communities.<\/p>\n

Information on this trade is sparse. As a starting point we built a database of fishing licenses issued to foreign trawlers from four West African countries for the period of 2005-2016: Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.<\/p>\n

Over this period, the foreign trawl fleet operating in the national waters of all four countries was dominated by vessels registered to China (47%), Spain (13%), South Korea (12%), Senegal (7%) and many countries with small percentages of the remainder.<\/p>\n