WEST AFRICA is a region plagued by all of humanity’s ills. The slave trade, colonial empires, civil war, desertification, pandemics, corruption—the nations of the Global North prefer to ignore the existence of economic refugees, but their methodical pillaging of the African continent goes on. Fisheries are no exception.
Since his first research mission in Ghana in 1971, Daniel has returned to Africa many times, learning about its geopolitics, taking a passionate interest in its decolonization, and shaking his head at the region’s vagaries. He has also met the leading lights of French fisheries science there, particularly in Dakar. Indeed, for over fifty years, Senegal has hosted a rich community of French researchers whose work centers entirely on fish and fisheries. It all began in 1938 with the arrival of Théodore Monod, who directed the Institut français d’Afrique noire until 1963. Though Monod is best known for his expeditions in the Sahara Desert, he began his career as a marine biologist interested in fish. Following in his footsteps and those of oceanographer Anita Conti, several generations of French researchers have flocked to West Africa to study its fisheries. In 1950, the French development agency ORSTOM was established there, housing more than thirty French expatriates by the late seventies. Even today, Dakar is home to 115 French and Senegalese researchers, most of whom work for ORSTOM’s successor, the IRD. Thanks to this European connection, Senegalese fisheries scientists often complete their studies in France—at the University of Western Brittany in Brest for the older generations or at the National School of Agronomy (ENSA )in Rennes for the younger ones—where they are coached in the productivist* doctrine of French fisheries science.
Since Ghana and his almost-hiring by ORSTOM in 1974, Daniel’s relations with French scientists stationed overseas had been rocky—and they were about to get worse. West Africa, and Senegal in particular, was soon to become an important front in the war between Pauly and his detractors.
The Canary Current system, which sweeps down Africa’s Atlantic coast from Morocco to Guinea, is one of the most fertile in the world. Historically, an incredible variety of marine life flourished there: pods of whales, sharks, giant rays, sea turtles, and swarms of seabirds. White clouds of such birds would guide local fishermen toward schools of fish so dense that they darkened the water. At dusk, lost sailors could follow flocks of terns and tropicbirds back to land. People who lived on the coast gathered various organisms, but especially grouper and sardinella. Despite their diminutive suffix, sardinella (which measure around eight inches in length) are in fact the larger cousins of the sardines commonly fished off the Atlantic coast of Europe. They are fatty and nourishing—though also full of bones. In the Wolof language of Senegal, they are called yaboï, and they feed an entire nation turned toward the sea. The Senegalese consume over 66 pounds of fish per person per year, covering three-quarters of their animal-protein requirements. Fishermen in pirogues† catch sardinella in purse seine nets‡ within thirty miles of the coast. The fish are then deposited on the beach where the women take over, drying, braising, or boiling them before preserving them in salt. The fish’s strong odor permeates homes throughout the country, especially the poorer ones. Senegalese fishers also catch the “white grouper” (thiof in Wolof), a plump and subtly marbled fish that is an object of intense fascination for the Senegalese. Whereas sardinella live in the water column alongside other pelagic fish, white groupers prefer the seabed, where they can stuff themselves with crustaceans and smaller fish. They are caught using lines, drift nets, or bottom trawling. Unlike the common yaboï, thiof is a luxury good that only the well-heeled can savor in their thiéboudiène.*
“Foreign boats come and take everything.” This is a complaint I heard constantly throughout the 1980s. At that time, my sister Isabelle was living with Serigne, who is from Ngor (near Dakar), and my family became part African. Back in the suburbs of Paris, I’d heard stories about a fishing village with narrow streets that resound with the call to prayer each day at sundown, a beach where beautifully painted pirogues come ashore, an enchanted island where locals sometimes sleep under the stars. After a childhood spent with my nose in plates of beef bourguignon and potato gratin, I ate my first mango and many other African delicacies, including thiof. Over dinner, I was told about the heroic daily lives of the piroguiers and the scrappy resourcefulness of hungry children who snatch small fish off the boats as they come ashore. My African family also complained about the armada of foreign ships that were pillaging African waters. This shameful practice had been going on for some time already and took several forms, but in essence, the whole world was helping themselves to the marine resources off the Senegalese coast.
Historically, tuna and sardine fishermen from Brittany or the Basque region were the first to set their nets off the coast of West Africa, beginning in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, this was the precise period when a colony of French fisheries scientists set up shop in Dakar. Indeed, I have been told that the catch statistics for tuna are particularly well documented, and many a French scientist has made their career by analyzing them. These fishing activities, in which the Spanish also participated actively, continued over the decades in order to supply Europe with Atlantic tuna. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Soviets arrived on the scene with their factory ships, mainly going after small pelagic fish off the coast of Mauritania and Namibia. Then, in the 1980s, boats from Asia, and particularly China, showed up. Even today, Europeans, Russians, and Asians are still putting a lot of pressure on West African fisheries. Their catches are partly legal, since tuna is mainly fished in international waters, and also because fishing agreements regulate the activities of foreign boats in the exclusive economic zones of some African countries: once an entry fee, sometimes substantial, is paid, the sea turns into an all-you-can-fish buffet for foreign vessels. These are referred to as “uncontrolled fisheries.” As if that weren’t enough, some boats operate completely outside of the law, a practice called “pirate fishing.” One way or another, all these catches find their way back to Europe or Asia. Perhaps most scandalously of all, an increasingly large share of smaller pelagic fish caught using purse seine nets aren’t even sold directly to consumers. Instead, they are transformed into fish meal and used to feed chickens, pigs, and farm-raised salmon. The rationale behind this process is dubious: it takes four or five tons of fresh fish to produce a single ton of fishmeal, and a lot more than one ton of meal to produce a single ton of salmon. Initially, meal factories were set up to process scraps, but for some time now, purse seiners have been fishing specifically to supply the factories, a setup somewhat obliquely referred to as “reduction fisheries.”
I wouldn’t make it to the fisheries center in Dakar until thirty years after Daniel, but finally, in October 2016, there I was, at the invitation of BirdLife International, a British NGO that was rightfully worried about the impact of fisheries on seabirds. I presented a synthesis of my team’s work showing that shearwaters and northern gannets, though protected on their nesting grounds in Brittany and on the islands off the coast of Marseille, were not so carefully looked after during their migrations in and around West Africa. There, they fall prey to accidental capture by industrial fishing boats, which are in direct competition with the birds for sardinella. Even worse, we strongly suspect Chinese vessels of catching the birds on purpose. This totally illegal type of hunting supplies the Chinese market with much prized “wild flavors,”* the most sought-after of which come from endangered species. Several containers of frozen gannets and shearwaters have been seized in the last few years in Senegal and Mauritania—a nightmare vision for a marine ornithologist such as myself. Seabirds are the most endangered of all bird groups, and they are all too easy to capture at sea. “If a market for them develops in China, you can say goodbye to the last albatrosses and other petrels endemic to the tropical and Antarctic seas,” warns Ross Wanless of BirdLife International. In Dakar, the work group in which I participated included both ornithologists and fisheries biologists, with many representatives from the Oceanographic Research Center of Dakar-Thiaroye (CRODT).
One of CRODT’s executives, Djiga Thiao, presented a very enlightening overview of the state of fisheries in West Africa. According to him, “all the available research confirms that sardinella are overexploited,” and he highlighted the fact that this “strong decline in fish stocks” is being caused by “all the maritime actors, including artisanal fishing.” Additionally, “the thiof stock has been in a state of collapse for years, to such an extent that it has even been added to the red list of endangered species.” I asked him about reduction fisheries, and he agreed that their “fast growth is very worrisome.” A Mauritanian colleague stepped in to add that in his country, no fewer than twentyseven fish meal plants are currently in operation, mainly to process sardinella brought in on Senegalese pirogues.
Thiao also mentioned the damage caused by illegal and uncontrolled fishing, as well as flaws in the surveillance system. During the Q & A that followed, the audience asked him to specifically identify the guilty parties. He hemmed and hawed some, but admitted that they were mostly Asian and European. A Catalan researcher pressed him for more information: “Can you give us an order of magnitude for this illegal fishing? Is it 10 percent, 50 percent, 100 percent as much as officially declared fishing?” Djiga Thiao refused to answer: “I work in a fisheries institute—there are some questions I don’t want to get involved in. There are some NGOs who give numbers, but I can only work with official figures.”
And that leads us straight to the heart of the problem: What is the actual scope of overfishing in West Africa, be it from official or pirated catches? This question had preoccupied Daniel for a long time.
Since the early nineties, he had been reflecting on the case of Sierra Leone, where artisanal fishing could feed the local population much more sustainably than blood diamonds, which mainly enrich South Africans and their mercenaries. With support from the European Union, ICLARM sent the indefatigable Michael Vakily to Freetown to coordinate a summary report on local fisheries using the protocol already established by Pauly and company. The main objective was to rescue a huge amount of data stored in Russian on floppy disks from simply rotting away in the tropical climate. With help from local fisheries scientists trained in Moscow, Michael decrypted the archives and created a database. He also organized a national conference on fisheries in November of 1991 with help from the FAO, which took place despite an unstable political situation and made it possible to analyze three decades of data from the postcolonial period, during which aquatic resources were still abundant and anything seemed possible.
That same year, though, Sierra Leone collapsed into chaos—Vakily stayed as long as he could, but he was ultimately evacuated with his family in 1994, without finishing the conference proceedings. The civil war raged on until 2002, killing several thousand people and creating a whole generation of child soldiers. Rebels took Freetown and transformed the library of the fisheries research center that Vakily had restored into a kitchen, burning most of the historical data.
Twenty years later, Katy Seto, the PhD student Daniel had charged with reconstructing statistics for Sierra Leone, contacted Vakily, who, after traveling around the world to help construct FishBase, was back in West Africa. Always meticulous, Michael had carefully conserved the conference proceedings in electronic format. They were finally published in 2012 with a less-than-optimistic preface by Rashid Sumaila, who noted: “What Africans, and Sierra Leoneans in particular, had not counted on is that independence did not guarantee access to these natural resources—indeed the competition for those resources continues still, and as far as fisheries resources are concerned, it is largely the EU, and increasingly China, which wins, and not Sierra Leone.”1 Unfortunately, as we shall see, the same can be said for all of West Africa.
IN THE LATE nineties, Daniel renewed ties with Birane Samb, whose career he had been following and supporting from afar since their first meetings at different ELEFAN training sessions between 1984 and 1986. Since then, Samb had been to the United States and France, where he studied at the École centrale de Lyon to become a hydroacoustics specialist. In fact, the best way to detect schools of small pelagic fish is by using sonar, a method Birane mastered perfectly. Based at the CRODT in Dakar, he participated in numerous surveys of small fish off the coast of West Africa. Oddly enough, these campaigns were organized by the Norwegians using the Dr. Fridtjof Nansen—a huge, white-sided oceanographic vessel 187 feet long that sailed the world surveying fish stocks in developing countries for more than two straight decades without even once returning to its port of origin in Bergen.
As a regional coordinator, Birane had access to the Nansen’s data on sardinella distribution. He noticed that stocks fluctuated greatly on the northern (Morocco) and southern (Senegambia) limits, but much less in the center of their distribution zone (Mauritania). According to the season, then, the entire sardinella population oscillated up and down a thin strip of coastal water, like liquid swishing back and forth in a tub. Birane concluded that it was essential to consider the sardinella stock as a whole, and that adopting a country-by-country management scheme would be a mistake. He mentioned this to Daniel, who encouraged him to publish his ideas and helped him write a note on the subject. The duo published an opinion piece alongside maps illustrating the sardinella’s distribution zone that largely spoke for themselves.2 They also took advantage of the opportunity to dispel several commonly held beliefs on fish stock management. In fact, in a famous article published in 1992, Baumgartner and a team of colleagues in California had suggested that populations of small pelagic fish fluctuate naturally, even in the absence of fisheries.3 They reconstructed historical population numbers by analyzing layers of sediment on the ocean floor off southern California, evaluating the density of fish scales in each layer and using that figure to measure how plentiful fish had been over the last two thousand years. They concluded that during that time, the total biomass of small pelagic fish varied on a scale of magnitude of one to seventeen.
But, as Samb and Pauly pointed out in a paper in 2000, focusing on this kind of natural variation only incites fisheries managers to avoid taking action, no matter what: even if fish stocks collapse after being overexploited by industrial fishing, it’s probably just due to natural causes, and the only thing to do is wait for the stocks to regenerate on their own. This is the argument used everywhere small pelagic fish are exploited, including in the most productive waters on the planet: West and South Africa, Peru, and California and Mexico. Samb and Pauly’s counterargument, however, was based on spatial variability: as their analysis of the sardinella shows, it is dangerous to try to understand the qualities of an entire fish stock based on an analysis of a single part of its distribution zone. Almost two decades later, though, their warning still falls on deaf ears. As André Fontana and Alassane Samba point out in their excellent book on fishing in Senegal, “none of the efforts to coordinate fish stock management have come to anything.”4
Samb and Pauly’s article received only a moderate amount of attention from the scientific community, but it sparked a big fight. Gabriella Bianchi of the Norwegian fisheries institute accused the duo of publishing the data without her permission. Indeed, although the Nansen collaborated with coastal African countries, in practice local researchers never used the data they collected. As Daniel put it, “To use the data, they have to have permission from ministries in every one of the surrounding countries—there’s so much bureaucracy that the data is, in reality, totally inaccessible. The Nansen program was regarded favorably, but there was a total lack of knowledge transfer, and that was its major flaw—only the Norwegians could use the data.”
Birane Samb has been with the FAO since 2010, where he still works alongside Gabriella Bianchi. When I ask him about the problem of data sharing, his answer is diplomatic: “Usually, there is a data utilization policy in place, but it wasn’t working at the time. It generated a lot of conflict. But ultimately, you have to look at the results—there needs to be a regional management scheme for sardinella; those stocks are the most widely shared in West Africa.” But at the time of the article’s publication in 2000, Gabriella Bianchi lost her composure. Though she knew Daniel already—he had been one of the readers for her doctoral thesis—the emails she sent after the publication of the editorial were, Daniel says, “a mixture of racism and vitriol” in which she accused him of “using and manipulating Birane Samb, because it couldn’t have been his idea to publish that article.” “I was so disgusted,” recalls Daniel. “I never worked with her again.” Their heated altercation proved productive, however—since 2006, the Nansen project has strengthened its partnerships with scientists in developing countries.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Daniel pressed on, working to create a large-scale synthesis of research on West African fisheries. “There were a lot of short-term studies,” Daniel points out, “but it’s only when you consider the long-term view that the worst effects of overfishing become visible.” The project, called the Système d’Information et d’Analyses des Pêches (Fishing Information and Analysis System), or SIAP, was financed by the European Union. For once, Daniel accepted that he would not have the time to manage yet another project and handed off responsibility to Michael Vakily and Pierre Chavance—although Palomares and Pauly did write one lengthy report, the Sea Around Us’s contribution to SIAP.5 The project offered local partners the opportunity to publish ecosystem models for all of West Africa’s maritime countries, which Villy Christensen then stitched together, demonstrating that the biomass of exploited marine resources in the region had fallen by 90 percent since 1960. In his editorial, Daniel points out that there has been “a massive decline of the abundance of larger fishes along the West African coast,” news that he insists “should impact on negotiations about access by Distant Water fleets.” This would indeed be the case, especially for Senegal, which has since made repeated attempts to rid itself of such maritime bloodsuckers. But, as the French proverb goes, when you chase the devil out the front door, he comes back through the window. In the last few years, foreign ships have continued their activities by adopting Senegalese nationality. In the Mediterranean, French fishers used this same tactic to continue chasing bluefin tuna. Until this loophole was closed by the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, French tuna boats simply became Libyan, filling the port of Sète with huge vessels sporting Arab-sounding names.
“THE WHOLE WORLD is pillaging Africa’s marine resources. The Senegalese may have chased off the foreign fleets, but their own fishers are still seriously overexploiting their resources,” explains Didier Gascuel. I contact Didier, an excellent interview subject, because of his contributions to SIAP and more importantly because, with Philippe Cury, he is one of the only French fisheries biologists of his generation to talk seriously about overfishing. As the head of the Association française d’halieutique (French Association for Fisheries Sciences), his words carry a certain weight, and he promotes the ecosystem approach to fisheries management with the EU in Brussels. Didier’s history is an interesting one: he joined Pauly’s school despite his early training in the “agronomics” approach to resource management. In France in the 1970s, students like Didier with a penchant for mathematics who were interested in nature and the ocean didn’t waste their time with traditional university programs in ecology, which were underdeveloped at the time. Instead, Didier completed a series of preparatory courses after high school, then joined the highly prestigious École nationale supérieure agronomique (ENSA )in Montpellier in 1978 and subsequently landed a permanent position with the Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA )in Rennes. Agronomy departments in France trained generations of ecologists, profoundly influencing their philosophies. This training tended to discourage scientists from getting involved in public debate, something that is still difficult for French ecologists.
“Those programs were all about postwar productivism,” Didier recalls. “When I think back on it, I turn red with shame, but at the beginning of my career, all I cared about was dead fish, totally divorced from their ecosystem. Everyone’s ideas evolved over time, but we were all exposed to that way of thinking in the beginning. Daniel was one of the pioneers, a visionary who tried to reconcile exploitation and conservation. Even his critics have to admit that now. Our discipline was confronted with the problem of overexploitation early on, but we thought science could fix everything and we put our faith in it blindly, thinking fisheries science would necessarily lead to sustainable fishing. The trouble, though, is that everyone was in his own little world, working on a single fish stock and thinking that, even though things weren’t going great, it would all work out in the end.”
“We also lived in a time,” Didier continues, “when scientists didn’t talk to the public—nothing was more humiliating for a scientist than seeing his name in a big newspaper. Your colleagues would actually look down on you if you spoke to the press. This was still the case inside the French research community until the early 2000s. In North America, of course, it’s the other way around—the best thing that can happen to a scientist is to get a big article in the Washington Post about his latest publication in Nature. The one in the newspaper is almost more important than the one in the scientific journal!”
Didier also visited Dakar in the early 1990s because, he says, “it was the center of excellence for studying fish population dynamics in the French-speaking world,” and he has maintained strong ties to West Africa. Today, he is still a member of the scientific committee that monitors fishing agreements between Mauritania and the European Union. It was because of his expertise in this area that he joined SIAP, where he encouraged West African countries to pool their data. “Normally, they tended to keep their data to themselves,” Didier notes. “I worked on setting up a data-sharing policy that would guarantee open access after a period of five years, and I’m quite proud of the result.”
But Daniel’s head nearly exploded: “At the time, it made me very angry—we had gotten funding to collect and organize that data, including historical information that we had thought was lost, and then it wasn’t going to be immediately accessible to everyone. Data has to be accessible, because by working with it, researchers are indirectly helping the countries in question.” Twice, once in the Philippines and now in Mauritania, Daniel had seen huge datasets, financed by tax dollars, “locked away by administrators and their passwords.” In the big-data revolution that was beginning, Daniel took the side of “immediate open access.” Didier doesn’t agree: “If you tell the Africans that, they’ll never put any of their data in the pool.” After arguing over the problem several times, the two colleagues ended up in “a violent shouting match in the streets of Dakar after a long day of meetings.” Each called the other an “idiot.” “Daniel was very terse, very authoritarian back then,” Didier recalls. “He wasn’t used to people standing up to him, but in a way, I think he enjoyed a good argument.”
Indeed, several years later, in 2004, when Didier visited Vancouver for the World Fisheries Congress, he fell in love with British Columbia and immediately sent Daniel an email asking if he could spend some time at UBC. “He got back to me right away with a big ‘YES.’” Didier moved to Vancouver in 2006, as soon as he could find the funding, and in the meantime, Daniel had become a new man. “His stroke changed him a lot,” Didier observes. “He pays a lot more attention to others.” The two discovered that they had something more in common: a Marxist youth. “That helped us bond,” comments Didier, whose whole career was transformed by his time in Vancouver. “I realized that research and activism can go together, that history is also written through individual political engagement.” Didier used his trip to Canada to finalize the biggest conceptual advancement of his career: the EcoTroph model. Like Ecopath, Didier’s new algorithm recreates marine ecosystems, but it sets aside the notion of species, using functional groups, the different “trades and professions” that structure every ecosystem. EcoTroph is now used to analyze the ecological impact of fisheries all over the planet.
Daniel and his team had already revealed how overzealous Chinese bureaucrats were padding catch levels in their domestic waters, causing an overoptimistic view of global catch trends. In its mad dash for the ocean’s remaining fish, though, China quickly ran up against the same problem as Europe and Russia: its own coastal waters were becoming rapidly impoverished, and Chinese fisheries were forced to expand their horizons. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, armadas of factory ships and a multitude of trawlers, purse seiners, and long-liners, already present on the open ocean, set out to plunder the coastal waters of Asia, South America, and Africa—their crews working in conditions so appalling as to be described as modern slavery. Even when these activities were legal, specialists suspected that their catch volumes were underreported so as to minimize the appearance of overfishing. “In 2004, when SIAP was finished, I still didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem,” admits Daniel, “and then I happened to read the 2008 French edition of Beuret et al.’s book Chinafrique and the fog lifted.” 6
To fill in the gaps in the FAO’s data, the Sea Around Us team estimated the actual Chinese catch using a host of detective methods that they later applied on a global scale.7 Using over five hundred sources (scientific publications, reports, news articles, fishing firms’ websites, and other online information) in several languages, including Chinese, they discovered that Chinese ships were fishing in the twohundred-mile exclusive economic zones of ninety-three other maritime countries, and that they could be found everywhere except for the Arctic, North America, and the Caribbean.8 They estimated that these 3,400-some ships capture 4.6 million metric tons of fish per year, a total market value of nine billion dollars, or approximately four times the figure reported by the Chinese authorities. Most disturbingly, Daniel and his team estimated that Chinese fisheries were pulling 3.1 million metric tons of fish out of African waters each year. Once published, the study attracted a lot of media attention, including in China. The Pew Foundation released a series of maps entitled “Where Chinese vessels fish,” with the biggest point on the map hovering over West Africa. “When it comes to Chinese fisheries,” concludes Didier Gascuel, “they’re almost always pillaging, so when Daniel’s study came out, everyone agreed it was good to hit them where it hurts.”
This information increased Senegal’s displeasure with foreign fisheries, but the Asian pro-fishing lobby struck back quickly and in a totally unexpected way. “The closing conference for SIAP had been such a big success, mainly because it had attracted the attention of the political sphere in Senegal. So, it was hugely disappointing, just a few years later, to see fisheries departments in West African countries saying that whales were behind the decline in fish stocks!” Daniel explains regretfully.
Smoke came out of Daniel’s years when he understood the reasons for this strange new attitude: Japan, Norway, and a few other countries had been campaigning for decades to continue whaling. Within the International Whaling Commission, their strategy was to rally as many developing countries to their cause as possible, influencing their votes by any means necessary. “The Japanese bribed officials from several African countries, including Senegal, to say that whales were eating the fish, which is absolutely impossible because whales go to West Africa to reproduce, and everybody knows that they don’t eat during that time,” Daniel points out. “It was depressing because several decades’ worth of research had just proven that overfishing (by humans) was the real problem.”
The WWF hastily assembled a work group in Dakar in May of 2008, of which Daniel was a part. The event attracted an extraordinary amount of attention from the media, opening with press conferences by several ministers. Happily, the scientific evidence was very much in the whales’ favor, and coastal residents love the creatures—the African politicians quickly abandoned their noxious rhetoric. Daniel returned to Vancouver, with “a heavy heart,” and published a scathing editorial in which he openly denounced the corruption of the Senegalese political elite.9 The following year, he coauthored an article in Science with Leah Gerber of Arizona State University, announcing that massacring West Africa’s remaining whales would not create any benefits for fisheries, whereas even slightly reducing the pressure of industrial fishing on marine resources would lead to noticeable improvements.10
“West Africa is the black hole of illegal fishing, especially the northwest.” Daniel knew it already. But the first reconstructions completed by the Sea Around Us, particularly the ones for Chinese fisheries, did not differentiate between legal and illegal catches. To clear things up, Daniel needed a strong ally, a bulldozer capable of smashing the status quo and breaking the policy of silence. Dyhia Belhabib fit the bill, a young woman born in Algeria who has the determination of an Antigone. Not wanting to live in her native country, nor in France like a lot of Algerian expatriates, she enjoys life in Vancouver, a “neutral territory.” We ate lunch together a few times during my stay in British Columbia, and I quickly sensed the magnitude of her talent and fury.
After studying at the École nationale supérieure des sciences de la mer in Algiers, then at the University of Quebec at Rimouski, she “didn’t think counting otoliths was very sexy” and discovered that Daniel Pauly, the man who had written so many papers, was still alive. She arrived in Vancouver in January of 2011 and joined the Sea Around Us as a volunteer to help update their database of the world’s marine reserves. When Daniel spotted her, he asked, “Why are you volunteering?” “Because,” Dyhia answered, “I want you to direct my thesis.” Daniel soon hired Dyhia, and she started off quite logically by reconstructing fisheries statistics for Algeria. “I’m really interested in how fishing affects people. Sometimes, it’s depressing, but that reconstruction was an essential first step for what I wanted to do next, which was analyze illegal fishing and evaluate the equity of fishing agreements.” After that, Dyhia estimated the “official and unofficial” catch volumes for the fisheries of twenty-two African countries with Atlantic coastlines, from Morocco to Namibia.
“I liked to start by studying the country’s history, especially during the colonial period. Then, I would examine the FAO data and look for shadowy areas, like periods where catch volumes stagnated in a suspicious way. Then, I did the bibliography, compiling sources in English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish, which allowed me to extract data by fishing sector, then do the reconstruction. Of course, I had the whole Sea Around Us team behind me, and when I got stuck, I could always go see Daniel—he’s like a living historical and fisheries dictionary.” To estimate catch volumes for some areas, Dyhia was forced to rely on a few nontraditional methods, including photos and videos of sport fishing she found on the internet—mostly big white men showing off the plump fish they’d caught in African waters. She even used Google satellite images to find fishing villages that may have been “forgotten” by the official statistics.
“Once I finished the reconstructions, I contacted our African partners so that they could check the information. Obviously, I didn’t have absolutely everything, but at some point, you have to know when to stop.” Dyhia confirmed how important artisanal fisheries are to the survival of the West African coast’s poorest inhabitants, while also demonstrating the fragility of their activity: artisanal fishermen are expanding their efforts even as the resources on which they depend grow scarcer. She studied Senegal closely, estimating that illegal fishing represents an annual revenue loss of 300 million dollars for the country. Lastly, she showed that European fisheries operating in West Africa declare less than 30 percent of their actual catch (1.6 million metric tons per year), and the Chinese less than 10 percent (of 2.3 million metric tons per year). Even if the Europeans and the Chinese toss a few coins to the African countries, they are still getting the better end of the bargain: fishing agreements only cost about 8 percent of the total value of the European catch, while the Chinese get an even sweeter deal by constructing various projects whose value was estimated to represent about 4 percent of their total catch value. The study clearly indicated that European fishing boats were guilty of misconduct—Spanish and French ships were increasingly failing to declare the true volume of their catches.
Dyhia wrapped up her thesis in three years, a rare feat in North America, and defended in December of 2014, eight months pregnant. “I absolutely had to finish before the baby was born, so I really picked up the pace—it was exhausting,” she admits. Unsurprisingly, her studies made a lot of noise, giving the African countries everything they needed to expel foreign fisheries. “We must close the door on the elephant of industrial fishing,” Dyhia states. “In Senegal, the revolution has already started—fishing agreements with Europe are limited to tuna. Gambia has outlawed all industrial fishing, and Liberia is holding its own against the Koreans. For the other countries, though, it’s more complicated. In Sierra Leone, illegal fishing increased during the Ebola epidemic. Mauritania put fishing quotas in place, but they still have a big surveillance problem. And things are not going well in Morocco, which bought drift nets from the Europeans after the EU banned them in 1992. The collateral damage caused by fishing is huge, and the Moroccan government just continues abusing the marine resources off Western Sahara. The problem is that all of the development projects around artisanal fishing in Africa have failed—they always lead to overcapacity and end up increasing poverty. It’s important to allow local fishers to benefit from local resources, but the infrastructure on land has to be reinforced first, in order to increase the market value of the fish.”
GOVERNMENTS AND NGOS alike applauded the Sea Around Us’s work in West Africa. “It was a real wake-up call,” insists Charlotte Karibuhoye of MAVA.* “Usually, you see this kind of study presented at international conferences where the audience is all from the same milieu, all scientists who already agree with what is being said, who want to test their theories. Pauly and his team reached other types of actors, decision makers, civil society. They got people thinking.”
“Monitoring of fishing activity was reinforced, and fines went way up,” remembers Camille Manel, of the Directorate for Sea Fishing in Dakar. Indeed, around that time, the charismatic Haïdar el Ali rose to power. Initially director of a diving school, the Oceanium in Dakar, which later became a center for the protection of the oceans, he was named minister of the environment in 2012, then minister of fisheries in 2013. He launched a campaign to take back Senegal’s national marine resources, going so far as to solicit Sea Shepherd* to police Senegalese waters. The hour of victory came early in 2014, when an illegal Russian trawler, the Oleg Naydenov, was seized by the Senegalese navy. The prize was exhibited proudly in the port of Dakar until the owner sent the government a check for 600,000 euros.
The case for fish seemed to be moving forward as well, at least in Senegal, but some scientists dug in their heels: a Franco-Senegalese team published an especially negative analysis of Dyhia Belhabib’s work.11 Basically, they accused Belhabib, Pauly, and their African partners of using erroneous data and largely overestimating catch volumes, particularly for Senegal. Indeed, when I first began looking into the project, Didier Gascuel had warned me: “You’re going to hear a lot of bad things about the reconstructions, especially for Senegal.”
I speak at length with Francis Laloë and Alassane Samba, who are retired from the IRD and the CRODT, respectively, and who both dedicated their careers to studying artisanal fisheries in Senegal. They were indeed fuming over Dyhia’s work. Despite these tensions, though, Alassane Samba very generously invites me to his home in Dakar. “It hurts that she [Dyhia] didn’t work with the people who had put the statistical systems in place—she didn’t listen to anyone.” He worries about the consequences of overestimating catch volumes in Senegal. “The Russians used those numbers to argue that Senegal has huge stores of resources we aren’t using.” He relates that Dyhia initially corresponded with local experts from the CRODT and IRD, but that disagreements got in the way, which was unfortunate for everyone. Dyhia, for her part, blames “the CRODT and IRD’s lack of transparency when it comes to their data,” and remembers “slamming [her] fist on the table after being yelled at”—she ultimately published her paper against the advice of certain local experts.
Daniel savors these skirmishes with gusto—conflict with the old IRD researchers was to be expected, and Dyhia’s spark reminds him of himself at that age. He helped her write a “political” response, alternating between an authoritative tone and a derisive one designed to take their detractors down a peg.12 “I didn’t need all that to know that the whole world is pillaging Africa’s fishing resources,” comments Didier Gascuel with an air of amusement. “But controversy is the norm with Daniel Pauly. You drop him into a community that’s running smoothly, and the next thing you know, it explodes. A lot of people don’t like that—he just has this aura, and you either love him or you hate him.”
Still, everyone can agree on the main issues: on a humid night in Dakar, I speak at length with Alassane Samba about pirate fishing, overcapacity in artisanal fisheries, the disturbing development of fish meal plants—“an aberration!” he calls them—and the frustration he feels as an ecologist. “Our politicians are useless—they only listen to scientists if it’s good for their bottom line,” he explains. “The last few years, surveillance has been basically nonexistent. The proceeds from the sale of fishing rights aren’t being reinvested in enforcement. Currently, there’s a single aerial patrol per month, with a French plane, and everyone knows about it beforehand. The state has a real problem maintaining sovereignty over its fishing resources.”
Djiga Thiao, who also coauthored the response to Belhabib’s article, minimizes the conflict with the Sea Around Us team: “We tried to avoid settling scores . . . It’s true that the official fishing statistics aren’t trustworthy, everyone agrees about that, even in the ‘rich countries’ . . . Daniel is very good at making pleas, and he attracts a lot of attention. He’s not afraid to take things a step further, go beyond the usual limits . . . He has an audience here—he engages in provocation, and people are too scared to contradict him. He attracts a lot of media attention, too, and we admire him for that. When he comes to Dakar, it’s in all the papers the next day. The NGOs pick up what’s been said, sometimes exaggerating it a little, but it gets people’s attention . . . Despite all the criticism, he might actually be having a positive impact on the management of West African fisheries.”
DANIEL HAS BECOME an authority figure for several generations of African ecologists. None of them expected to meet a half-Black man. “My African students were in awe,” recalls Coleen Moloney of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, who invited Daniel to the first post-apartheid conference on marine ecosystems in 1996. Gotthilf Hempel laughs heartily as he recounts his own experiences in Africa, where mentioning that he was Daniel Pauly’s thesis director causes him to rise instantly in the esteem of his African colleagues. “Daniel is worth ten of you or me,” asserts Philippe Cury of the French IRD. “Just by himself, he’s managed to change things more than all our development projects combined—and most importantly, he’s always available to help students from the Global South. He spends a huge amount of time and energy on them—if some guy from some out-of-the-way place asks him for help, he jumps on a plane without thinking twice. In Ghana, I saw him leave an international conference because a local student asked him for advice. They got in a taxi and drove fifty kilometers to see the site he was studying, and three months later, they published a paper together.” For his part, Daniel is a little more circumspect: “Most of the African researchers I’ve trained fell in line and went to work for the establishment—in the end, nothing changed.”
Before leaving Dakar, I stop to see Serigne, who treats me to yassa* on the roof terrace of his house in Ngor, which has a fantastic view of the Atlantic, where we can see local kids surfing. After lunch, I take a dip in the waves and we relax on the beach, sipping soda. Not far from where we are sitting, I notice a few Swedish fiftysomethings drinking beer, surrounded by young—supposedly legal-aged—Senegalese girls in heavy makeup. Africa is selling its youth, too. I knew it already, but it always hurts to watch.
* The Oxford English Dictionary defines productivism as “the doctrine or theory that increasing productivity is the primary goal of socio-economic activity.” (TN)
† A type of small, traditional banana-shaped boat usually made of wood and, in Senegal, often painted in bright colors. (TN)
‡ A large, pocket-shaped net that is closed around a school of fish.
* The national dish of Senegal, composed of rice, vegetables, and fish.
* Called yewei in Mandarin.
* MAVA: a nature foundation founded by Swiss ornithologist Luc Hoffmann that is very active in Africa.
* Sea Shepherd: an NGO known for aggressively interfering with fishing vessels, especially whaling ships.
* Chicken with onions.