During their World Fisheries Day celebration in NyaningPointe Sarène, Sénégal, the African Confederation of Artisanal Fisheries Professional Organizations (CAOPA) called on the African Union to establish 2016 as the African Year for Artisanal Fisheries.
The Nianing-Pointe Sarène Declaration, made on 21 November 2014, stated that men and women of African small-scale fishing communities, members of the CAOPA, recommend to our States:
– To strengthen the interests of women in fisheries, to build their capacity and their autonomy, thus setting right the inequity between women and men;
– To better prepare negotiations of the fisheries agreements, with the effective participation of all stakeholders in the whole process, in a transparent manner, and based of the best research advice;
– To ensure the activities of joint ventures and other types of access offered to vessels of foreign origin are transparent, do not compete with sustainable artisanal fishing operations, are in line with sustainable fisheries exploitation and deliver expected social and economic benefits;
– To support the establishment of national and regional programmes for the popularisation and dissemination of the International Voluntary Guidelines for Sustainable Artisanal Fisheries adopted by the Committee on Fisheries (COFI) of the FAO;
– To promote and share the results of studies aimed at assessing the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of coastal communities to climate change and identify policies and strategies to support these communities; and
– To promote and encourage the establishment of financing systems adapted to the realities and the needs of the artisanal sector.
The Declaration noted that most of the exploitation of the fisheries resources by African small-
scale fishers is done within a few tens of kilometers in the coastal zone, a fragile zone threatened by climate change and the increasing pressure of activities including fishing as well as other uses of the coast.
The Declaration also noted the increasing pressures from industrialised countries looking for fishing
possibilities in West Africa for stocks which are mostly overfished. Most fishing agreements signed by the West African countries with distant-water fishing nations are based on the existence of unproven surplus, do not take into account wider impacts on the ecosystems, lack transparency, and present risk for the sustainability of artisanal fishing activities, and for the processing and marketing of fisheries products in the region.
The Nianing-Pointe Sarène Declaration ended by calling on governments to propose to the African Union that it establish 2016 as the African Year of Artisanal Fisheries.