From an NPR broadcast transcript:
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
When I was in the Senegalese fishing town of Kayar, on the west coast of Africa a few months ago, I sat at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean with a fisherman named Serigne Mou Diop.
(Speaking Wolof).
SHAPIRO: “This time of year, we used to catch lots of sardines,” he told me. “Now, it’s been 10
years since we’ve seen them.”
When fishermen in a fishing town can’t make a living, they often look abroad for opportunities. Today at npr.org, we’ve launched a sweeping project where you can take the journey many men like him make, traveling from Senegal to Morocco to Spain. Some of our reporting relies on research by environmental scientist Dyhia Belhabib, whose work focuses on illegal fishing.
SHAPIRO: Now, countries in West Africa have signed fishing agreements with foreign governments. So are these foreign trawlers operating legally or illegally?
BELHABIB: Well, it depends, because there are some trawlers that operate completely legally. There are some trawlers that are authorized to fish there, but they still kind of do not comply with the regulations that are meant for sustainability. And then you have trawlers that operate completely illegally despite the existence of agreements with other countries.
SHAPIRO: What does illegal fishing look like? How does that actually happen?
BELHABIB: There are lots of types of illegal fishing. So inherently, you have a trawler that is not authorized to fish within these waters that comes in, which we call an incursion, takes fish away and leaves. And that is with no authorization and no knowledge of the local authorities. And you have others that are authorized, but they may use a different gear. They may go into what we call an artisanal zone, which is a restricted area for the artisanal sector, and fish there, which is still illegal fishing. And yet they still have an authorization to fish. So it’s a matter of you having a driving license, if you will, but then drinking and driving. Yeah.
SHAPIRO: The boats that these fishermen use to catch their fish are the same boats, in many cases, that migrants use to make the journey to Europe. And so many people told us about European patrols in Senegalese water to stop those pirogues from leaving – Spanish military boats actually intercepting these pirogues. Why hasn’t the international community put the same effort into protecting the fisheries so that some of these people in Senegal might be able to stay where they are?
BELHABIB: It’s ironic – isn’t it? – because they take their fish away, but they are not taking their people in there. So as we often say, fish does not need a visa. In this particular case, the migrations, or the illegal migrations, affect Europe, but the fish that is going in there, albeit illegally sometimes, does not have the same impact, au contraire.