Global Fish Crisis | Still Waters, National Geographic Magazine: Saint Louis, Senegal Squatter Town Next to Fishing Boats on Ocean
This is a fisherman’s village right at the edge of the ocean in St. Louis. The authorities have been trying to get rid of this community, but the fishing is the most important aspect of St. Louis and these folks have fought off the government. This time of year they fish at night and are so successful that they have decided amongst themselves to only have half the boats go out each day. The price of fish was incredibly low because there are so many and because these fishermen are so adept at exploiting the resource. Industrialized fishermen pay a license to fish, but then there is no limit for how much they can catch. The artesenal fishermen are not regulated in any way.
From Paul Salopek story, Fade to Blue:
But as global fish populations shrivel–and especially since the richest nations have sealed off their coastlines inside 200-mile “exclusive economic zones”–the crews of thousands of steel-hulled trawlers from the developed world have taken to raiding or buying their way into the waters of the poor. The result: a showdown over scarce protein in which some 20 million ragged traditional fishermen such as Rodriguez are the inevitable losers. “We are witnessing the last buffalo hunt at sea,” says Reg Watson, a researcher at the University of British Columbia who has helped document steep declines in the world’s key seafood stocks since the 1960s. “Our southern oceans are becoming the new Wild West.” And so it goes tonight on the remote
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