Global Fish Crisis | Still Waters, National Geographic Magazine: Tide of Protein Drying in the Sahara | Senegal

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A tide of protein comes ashore on Senegal’s coast where the Sahara meets the sea. These fishermen often catch so many of these Atlantic bumpers that some days they take only half their boats out to fish. Such grass roots conservation is heartening. But even at the local level, global demand for fish continues to rise: 60 per cent of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of the sea.

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.