On a beach south of Ivory Coast’s economic hub Abidjan, a group of fishermen are spending the day sitting in the shade and playing cards.
Normally, they would be out on their boats — long canoes known as pirogues — and hunting the seas.
But this month, they have been banned from doing so to help the country’s badly depleted fisheries recover.
“We can’t do anything, we can’t do anything at all,” said Patrick Ange Yao, a fisherman since the turn of the century.
“We sit here, we chat,” he said. But “we don’t even know where to go — we just go around in circles.”
Overfishing compounded by climate change has left the waters off the West African state alarmingly void of a decent catch.
In May, the government announced an “annual biological rest period” in the nation’s 200,000-square-kilometre (77,000-square-mile) Exclusive Economic Zone.
The measure entails a ban on trawling for a range of commercial species, including red tuna, sardinella, anchovies and threadfin.
Artisanal fishermen are being banned in July and “industrial and semi-industrial” vessels in July and August.
Poverty
But the interdiction has come without any aid, leaving families of small-scale fishermen in dire straits.
Yao and other men in Aleya, a village wedged between Abidjan and the sea, said they came from the Alladian ethnic group, a community that for generations has lived from fishing.
They could not imagine doing anything else.
“We do the fishing and our wives sell the fish, so when (fishing) stops, everything comes to a halt,” said Yao.
Some of their spouses are buying frozen fish and hawking it to try to make a living, but “we earn nothing,” said Gladys Donco, the wife of a fisherman and a trader for 32 years.
Frozen fish brings in just 3,000 CFA francs ($5) per day, Donco and her friend Alice Koffi explained.
By comparison, a successful month between July and December catching sea bream or a species called forkbeard can bring in up to 500,000 francs.
Earnings from a catch are divided up between the fishermen, who usually work in teams of five.
They typically take home a salary higher than the country’s minimum wage of 75,000 francs.
Trawler damage
Ivory Coast is not the only West African nation with sickly fisheries.
Amnesty International reported in May that chronic over-fishing, especially by foreign-owned industrial trawlers, was having a “devastating” impact on the region, costing The Gambia, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone $2.3 billion per year in losses.
Climate change is another threat.
According to the World Bank, warming oceans and rising carbon dioxide levels will cause catches off Ivory Coast to decline by 40 percent by 2100.
In Aleya, other fishermen sat atop their pirogues with their backs to the sea, shuttling needles back and forth to repair their nets while a huge tuna ship loomed on the horizon.
Industrial tuna vessels will be banned from January through March.
Breaking the ban is out of the question, the fishermen said.
Boat patrols “come out at 11:00 pm every evening,” said one, Ismael Emmanuel Maniga.
Many argued that the impact of artisanal fishing on fish reproduction was far less than that of industrial fishing.
If the fish are there, a pirogue may come home with a catch of 500-600 kilograms (1,100-1,300 pounds), on a trip lasting several days, said Yao.
But trawlers can net tonnes over the same period, including juvenile fish that have yet to mature and reproduce.
“It takes at least three months for the fish to come back” after an area is swept clean, Yao said, referring to the sometimes illegal practices by Chinese vessels.
The damage meant they had to venture farther out to sea, toward the border of Ghana or Liberia, and as much as 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the coast, they said.
“We have children — we don’t know what we’re going to do to feed them and keep a roof over our heads,” said Kouame Benjamin Kouakou.
