Global Fish Crisis | Still Waters, National Geographic Magazine: Selling fish carcasses in Tanzania | Africans are Left With the Bones

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In villages between Lake Victoria and the Serengeti Ecosystem, truckloads of rotting fish carcasses are driven to the local markets and sold. The filets were cut off in the processing plants in Musoma and shipped to Europe overnight, and the Africans get only the bones. This is a cotton production area and these people have just sold their crops.  They have money to buy good food, but they don’t have the option to buy their own fish from their own lakes. This is only one example of the “protein drain” in Africa.

From Paul Salopek story, Fade to Blue:

In Senegal, fishers in hand-dug canoes have been plowed under by European trawlers. Indonesian gunboats now protect domestic fishermen by blasting foreign poachers out of the water. And bizarre cops-and-robbers chases have begun roiling even Antarctica’s remote seas: Last August, an Australian patrol boat pursued a sea bass pirate more than 4,000 miles across the bottom of the world. But the ultimate redoubt of the fishing wars–conflicts that northern consumers benefit from but hardly know exist–is the immensely long, untamed and vulnerable shoreline of sub-Saharan Africa. For decades, European, Russian, Japanese and Korean boats–both legal and piratical–have raked Africa’s rich continental shelves. Now China, a powerful new player in the world’s fish race, has steamed into the African battlefield.