In Sierra Leone, local fishers and foreign trawlers battle for their catch
Overfishing isn’t a new problem in West Africa, where industrial fishing boats from across the world harvest massive quantities of seafood for both local and foreign markets. Many use ecologically destructive practices like bottom trawling, where vessels drag huge nets across the ocean floor, indiscriminately scooping up anything too big to escape and churning up corals, rocks and sediment. In Ghana, for example, a report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) last year found that fish populations are on the edge of collapse, with the total landing tonnage caught by artisanal fishers declining by more than a third between 1996 and 2016. In 2018 alone, artisanal landings dropped by 13.8% compared to the preceding five-year average.
