BBC Future: The factories turning West Africa’s fish into powder

GAMBIA
Thursday, March 25, 2021, 07:00 (GMT + 9)

The following is an excerpt from an article published by The BBC:

Chinese-run factories are turning huge amounts of The Gambia’s fish stocks into fishmeal for aquaculture. But are they taking too much, too quickly?

Gunjur, a town of some 15,000 people, sits on the Atlantic coastline of southern Gambia, the smallest country on the African continent. During the day, its white-sand beaches are full of activity. Fishermen steer long, vibrantly painted wooden canoes, known as pirogues, toward the shore, where they transfer their still-fluttering catch to women waiting at the water’s edge.

The fish are hauled off to nearby open-air markets in rusty metal wheelbarrows or in baskets balanced on heads. Small boys play soccer as tourists watch from lounge chairs. At nightfall, work ends and the beach is dotted with bonfires. There is drumming and kora lessons; men with oiled chests grapple in traditional wrestling matches.

Demand for seafood has doubled since the 1960s, but it has exhausted fish stocks in many coastal waters (Credit: Fábio Nascimento/The Outlaw Ocean Project)

Hike five minutes inland, and you’ll find a more tranquil setting: a wildlife reserve known as Bolong Fenyo. Established by the Gunjur community in 2008, the reserve is meant to protect 790 acres of beach, mangrove swamp, wetland, savannah, and an oblong lagoon. The lagoon, a half-mile (800m) long and a few hundred yards wide, has been a lush habitat for a remarkable variety of migratory birds as well as humped-back dolphins, epaulet fruit bats, Nile crocodiles, and callithrix monkeys.

A marvel of biodiversity, the reserve has been integral to the region’s ecological health – and, with hundreds of birders and other tourists visiting each year, to its economic health, too.

But on the morning of 22 May 2017, the Gunjur community discovered that the Bolong Fenyo lagoon had turned a cloudy crimson overnight, dotted with floating dead fish. “Everything is red,” one local reporter wrote, “and every living thing is dead.” Some residents wondered if the apocalyptic scene was an omen delivered in blood. More likely, ceriodaphnia, or water fleas, had turned the water red in response to sudden changes in pH or oxygen levels. Locals soon reported that many of the birds were no longer nesting near the lagoon.

The small fishing boats used by Gambian fishermen cannot compete with the large foreign-owned vessels (Credit: Ian Urbina)

Golden Lead is one outpost of an ambitious Chinese economic and geopolitical agenda known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which the Chinese government has said is meant to build goodwill abroad, boost economic cooperation, and provide otherwise inaccessible development opportunities to poorer nations. As part of the initiative, China has become the largest foreign financier of infrastructure development in Africa, cornering the market on most of the continent’s road, pipeline, power plant and port projects.  

In 2017, China cancelled $14m (£10m) in Gambian debt and invested $33m (£23.8m) to develop agriculture and fisheries, including Golden Lead and two other fish-processing plants along the 50-mile (80km) Gambian coast. The residents of Gunjur were told that Golden Lead would bring jobs, a fish market, and a newly paved, three-mile road through the heart of town.

Golden Lead and the other factories were rapidly built to meet an exploding global demand for fishmeal – a lucrative golden powder made by pulverising and cooking fish. Exported to the United States, Europe, and Asia, fishmeal is used as a protein-rich supplement in the booming industry of fish farming, or aquaculture. West Africa is among the world’s fastest-growing producers of fishmeal: more than 50 processing plants operate along the shores of Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, and The Gambia. The volume of fish they consume is enormous: one plant in The Gambia alone takes in more than 7,500 tons of fish a year, mostly of a local type of shad known as bonga – a silvery fish about 10in (25cm) long.

The Sam Simon's smaller speedboats ferried Gambian Navy troops to inspect a Chinese fishing vessel (Credit: Ian Urbina)

A few residents filled bottles with water from the lagoon and brought them to the one person in town they thought might be able to help – Ahmed Manjang. Born and raised in Gunjur, Manjang now lives in Saudi Arabia, where he works as a senior microbiologist. He happened to be home visiting his extended family, and he collected his own samples for analysis, sending them to a laboratory in Germany.

The results were alarming. The water contained double the amount of arsenic and 40 times the amount of phosphates and nitrates deemed safe. The following spring, he wrote a letter to Gambia’s environmental minister, calling the death of the lagoon “an absolute disaster”. Pollution at these levels, Manjang concluded, could only have one source: illegally dumped waste from a Chinese fish-processing plant called Golden Lead, which operates on the edge of the reserve. Gambian environmental authorities fined the company $25,000 (£18,000), an amount that Manjang described as “paltry and offensive".(continues...)

Author: Ian Urbina / BBC |  Read the full article by clicking the link here

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