text and photos by rich press
Rich is an American science writer and photographer with an abiding interest in fisheries and people who make their living on the water.
On the banner photo, Edison Kobina is building a new fishing pirogue from salvaged wood on the beach in Grand Béréby. Boat building is his full-time occupation.
It is a busy day on the beach in Grand Béréby, a town in the West African nation of Cote d’Ivoire. Fishing boats are arriving, and hundreds of people have gathered to meet them.
Young men pick up work hauling bins of fish. Women sit on overturned buckets cleaning and scaling fish. Children chase each other in the sand and, like spectators at a sporting event, older gentlemen — retired fishermen — rest on benches facing the sea and watch the boats come in.
The boats are large wooden canoes called “pirogues”. Each carries about a half-dozen men who have toiled at sea for three or four days. Every time a pirogue motors in, young men dive into the waves and swim out to meet it. Minutes later, they wade back through the surf balancing heavy bins of fish on their heads. As they march up the beach, their feet digging deeply into the sand, women with empty buckets crowd around them. Then the bargaining begins.
In this town and countless others like it, men do the fishing and women buy and sell what they catch. But finding fish has gotten harder in recent years as fish populations have declined.
“Boats used to go out in the morning and come back full in the afternoon,” says Alice Kouhé Trahim, who has come to the beach to buy fish to smoke and sell. Now the boats have to travel further and stay out for days.
One reason, Trahim says, is the number of customers. “People here used to fish just to feed their families. Today, fish traders come from San Pedro, from Abidjan” — the nearby regional capital and the country’s largest city, a ten-hour drive away — “from everywhere.”
Large trawlers fish in waters where industrial fishing is supposedly illegal. “With one net, they take enough fish to fill ten pirogues,” said Kwaku Penye, a fisherman. Photo by Rich Press.
Trahim also speaks about what might be an even bigger problem: foreign-owned industrial trawlers. “They come in with huge nets and take all the fish,” Trahim says. National regulations prohibit industrial fishing within three nautical miles of shore, but those regulations are seldom enforced.
Trahim got into the fish business after her husband died in 2010. She started by scraping together an initial investment of about $10. “I have to work for my children, to feed them and send them to school,” she said. “If I sit with my arms crossed, who will feed us?”
The first MPA of Côte d’Ivoire?
Trahim’s experience shows how important healthy fish populations are to the people of this community. Last year, the Cote d’Ivoire government announced that it would create a marine protected area near Grand Béréby to sustainably manage fisheries and to protect ocean wildlife. MPAs, which are used around the world to manage ocean ecosystems, allow for varying amounts fishing and other uses. They attempt to strike a balance between the use and conservation of natural resources.
The Grand Béréby MPA will cover about 2400 square kilometers of ocean. For comparison, that is about 80 percent the size of Yosemite National Park in the United States. It will include a 54 km stretch of coastal water. Besides vital fisheries, the area is home to endangered populations of leatherback, olive ridley and green sea turtles and threatened populations of sharks and rays. It will be the first MPA in Cote d’Ivoire, and one of the largest in West Africa.
Alice Kouhé Trahim selling fish at the beach at Grand Béréby, Cote d'Ivoire. She is a member of the Cooperative des Femmes Mareyeurs of Grand Béréby and the President of the Federation des Associations des Femmes Entreprenantes de Grand Béréby. Photo by Rich Press.
While the Cote d’Ivoire government has announced that it will create the MPA, it hasn’t created it yet. Jose Gomez Peñate, the founder Conservation des Espèces Marines, or CEM, an organization that works to protect sea turtles in the area, said he expects the Ivorian government to officially create the MPA soon and that, “industrial fishing will be prohibited.”
Many organizations have been working to promote the MPA. These include the Cote d’Ivoire government, the Rainforest Trust, and the UK government’s Darwin Initiative, among others. But CEM is the main organization working with local communities and moving things forward on the ground.
community-based conservation efforts to protect turtles
CEM is based in Grand Béréby. And though it was founded in 2014, Gomez Peñate has been working in the area since the 1990s. CEM protects sea turtle populations by working with local groups on conservation and development projects. Over the years, CEM has wrangled funding from donors to build a new primary school in the nearby village of Roc. They also installed solar-powered water pumps there. Just recently, CEM worked with a women’s fish processing cooperative to secure funding for refrigeration equipment. That will allow women like Alice Kouhé Trahim to sell higher quality fish at a higher price.
Thérése Tah has eight children, the youngest being eight years old, and is the main breadwinner for her family. She is also a member of the Cooperative of Grand Béréby.
Savaina Nana cleans and scales fish, will smoke it at her home, and then sell it. Smoked fish will keep for a month without refrigeration. Nana has four children and 26 grandchildren.
CEM also worked with people in nearby fishing villages to create a community-managed conservation area that protects a 54 kilometer stretch of sea turtle nesting beach. (This beach will now form the northern boundary of the MPA). In addition to protecting the turtles, this provides opportunities for people who live nearby. Some work as research assistants, not only collecting data but sharing their knowledge of the ecosystem with scientists. Others work as eco-guides, bringing tourists to see turtles nesting at night.
These efforts and others have virtually eliminated the poaching of sea turtles and sea turtle eggs in the area. The number of green turtle nests have increased from 10-20 per year in 2010 to 130-150 today. The number of olive ridley nests have doubled from roughly 300 to 600 over the same period.
Hopefully, the same dynamic of community involvement will take hold with the MPA. The MPA will benefit people because, among other things, it will prohibit industrial fishing throughout its 40-plus kilometer extent from shore. But this prohibition will only be effective so far as if it can be enforced.
upscaling surveillance in the area
To help with that, CEM and Rainforest Trust recently collaborated on purchasing a seven-meter motor boat for use by the Grand Béréby Maritime Police, with ongoing funding for gasoline and maintenance. This is the first time the maritime police have a patrol boat and the first time that authorities there, or most anywhere along the Ivorian coast, have the operational means to combat illegal fishing.
"The work is difficult and dangerous," said Anthony Assifua, a fisherman. "If you're not careful, you can lose your life."
In November 2021, on one of their first patrols, the maritime police spotted a trawler with its nets deployed about three kilometers from shore, well within the coastal zone where industrial fishing is already prohibited. The police ordered the trawler to cut its engine and haul in its nets. They then boarded the trawler and confiscated its papers so authorities in the capital can impose a fine.
One patrol boat will not be able to solve the problem of illegal industrial fishing. For starters, the MPA will be far too vast for it to patrol completely. Also, the authorities in the capital may not follow up with fines. Even if they do, the trawler owners might refuse to pay. The trawler in the recent encounter, Lu Rong Yuan Yu 220, is a sister ship of one that refused to pay a US$ 1 million fine for illegal fishing off the coast of Ghana in 2019.
But the maritime police will be able to patrol the waters near Grand Béréby at least. And the trawlers now know that if they’re caught in the area, they’ll be forced to haul in their nets and leave. If nothing else, that will cost them a day’s fishing.
“I believe in the possibility of small successes,” Gomez Peñate said. “And I think the trawlers will learn that they should fish someplace else.”
West Africa has pioneered several decades of artisanal fisheries management reform. Yet there are still major obstacles to co-management: a lack of political will reflected in low budgetary allocations; inadequate and poorly targeted support for fisher organizations; poorly defined roles and responsibilities of fishers in co-management; lack of enforcement of inshore exclusive zones; and inadequate defense of human rights and particularly the important role of women.