Fish are crucial to nutrition and livelihoods in West Africa, with an estimated 5.5 million tonnes caught in the region’s waters in 2019. Nearly 7 million people in West Africa directly depend on fish activities for food or employment, a 2015 study found.
But a number of factors are depleting fish stocks, causing economic hardship and thus fuelling irregular migration to Europe. These include an influx of foreign trawlers in the region’s waters, lopsided fisheries agreements with foreign governments, weak laws and poor law enforcement.
Experts say these issues can be overcome. They believe West African countries should: work together as a bloc to ensure it can strike fairer fisheries deals; invest in monitoring and surveillance to deter illegal fishing; and implement policies that better protect the marine ecosystem on which fish stocks depend.
Between 2017 and 2023, more than 900,000 migrants arrived irregularly in Europe by sea and land through Italy, Spain, Greece, Malta and Cyprus, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM). An estimated 26% of these came from West and Central Africa.
The journey is treacherous. Many who set out do not make it to Europe and are forced to return home. Others perish.
Between January and March this year, 532 people went missing as they attempted to cross the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, the IOM report notes, with disappearances mainly linked to drowning, dehydration or hypothermia.
Illegal fishing has led to the loss of more than 300,000 artisanal – or traditional – fishing jobs in West Africa, according to the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers (ICSF). As a result, these people are forced to find work in another sector or to look abroad for it.
The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated conditions driving irregular migration. A UN report on extreme poverty in West Africa, published in January 2022, revealed that “nearly 25 million people are unable to meet their basic food needs, which is 34% higher than in 2020.”
There is historical precedent for this. In 2005 and 2006, fish stocks in Senegal collapsed, and close to 36,000 West Africans – mostly from Senegal and Mauritania – fled to the Canary Islands in an attempt to enter Europe, according to a report by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime.
Many of the irregular migrants from The Gambia and Senegal that China Dialogue spoke to – and their families – say that seeking greener pastures in Europe is their main motivation for leaving.
In a 2019 paper, researchers analysed the EU’s so-called sustainable fishing agreements and identified the damage the deals are causing to West African nations. Its authors followed up with an article noting that other countries, including China and Russia, are also part of the picture.