During more than half a century of working as a fisherman in Jamaica, Richard Osbourne has seen the industry steadily decline in the face of pollution, climate change, overfishing and other issues. Then came the sargassum. Over the past decade, the seaweed has frequently swamped the community of Portland Cottage, where Mr. Osbourne operates a small fishing boat. And he believes the problem may be getting worse.
In 2023, when he said the scale of the influx was second only to 2022, the seaweed came early and reached a peak in July and August. Boat engines and other equipment have taken a beating, and attempting to skirt the sargassum blooms means using more petrol, which burns a bigger hole in fishers’ pockets. But Mr. Osbourne and his colleagues said the worst of the impact is the reduced catch. Sargassum “kills the fish; it kills the mangroves, it kills the oysters. Everything that lives in the sea, it damages them, down to the very alligator. A very dangerous thing,” Mr. Osbourne said.
Fishers across the Caribbean have experienced similar issues since massive influxes began arriving in the region in 2011. “It’s a very serious issue, I think, especially because it’s almost an annual occurrence now,” said Melanie Andrews-Bacchus, a Trinidad-based consultant who has worked on fisheries issues in more than a dozen Caribbean countries. “The sargassum is becoming thicker; I guess a lot harder to manage in some instances. …It’s definitely a serious issue for the small-scale fisheries sector especially.”
The extent of the impact, however, is still unknown, according to a September report by the Western Central Atlantic Fisheries Commission, a 34-member regional fisheries body established under the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). “The impacts of sargassum influxes on fishermen livelihoods have not yet been fully analysed and documented,” the report stated. “For example, within the fisheries sector there has been a loss of fishing days, reduced catches of flying fish, damage to fishermen engines, and increased operating costs. However, the economic losses associated with these events have not been quantified and calculated.”
Often, fishers are left to face the problem on their own. In Jamaica, many said they have not received help from the state to remove sargassum, and they either have to do it on their own or wait for nature to take care of the problem. The clean-up efforts that do receive government support often focus on tourist areas, and some fishers have seen improper disposal — such as dumping sargassum in ecologically sensitive areas — that could further damage the natural environment on which their livelihood depends.
A National Sargassum Response Plan for Jamaica was drafted in 2015, and officials at the country’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) said they use it to guide their response to influxes. But the plan was never officially adopted at the government level, and accounts from fishers and public officials alike suggest that it has not been consistently followed or adequately funded. In fact, most fishermen interviewed by Centro de Periodismo Investigativo said they had never heard of it.
Monique Curtis, NEPA’s spokesperson, said that most of the funds set aside to assist in the cleanup of beaches had to be returned because communities and fishers rarely requested them. She said they prefer to clean up themselves or allow the sargassum to disintegrate naturally.Government minist ers blamed the lack of public education for this situation, explaining that plans are in the works to improve education efforts moving forward.
Fishing industry in Jamaica
Though Jamaica’s economy is largely tourism- and service-based, the fisheries industry contributes to the livelihoods of more than 100,000 people — nearly five percent of the population, according to the FAO. The country also has one of the highest per-capita levels of fish consumption in the Americas. Jamaicans eat an average of 26.42 kilograms of seafood per year, ranking eighth out of 35 countries in the Americas, according to 2020 data from the FAO. Six of the seven higher-consuming countries — led by Antigua and Barbuda, at 57.12 kilograms per year — are small island states in the Caribbean.
But Jamaica’s industry has long been under threat: In the mid-1990s, catch ranged between 19,000 and 25,000 tons annually, and by 2017 it had dropped to 16,000 tons, according to the FAO. The sargassum has exacerbated the problem in recent years, in part because about 95 percent of the island’s fishing fleet is made up of smaller boats powered by one or two outboard engines that can easily be overwhelmed by the seaweed. Donovan Haye, scientific officer at the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (C-CAM) in Jamaica, said certain types of fishing, such as net fishing, trawling and line fishing, often are so badly impacted that they are nearly impossible during the sargassum peak season.
Response plan
After a particularly bad influx in 2015, Jamaica’s NEPA drafted the national response plan and tapped an emergency fund for about $32,000 to clean up eight beaches and carry out other mitigation efforts. But since then, clean-ups and funding alike have been limited, and key elements of the plan haven’t been implemented even though NEPA uses it as a working strategy. The plan, for instance, calls for the creation of a mitigation fund. But this fund was never established, the government acknowledged, and information provided by NEPA for this investigation indicates that the agency has spent less than $10,000 — including about $6,500 from the Tourism Enhancement Fund — on clean-up efforts since 2015.
Most of this spending came between 2016 and 2018, after which clean-ups were mostly spearheaded by beach operators and owners, according to NEPA. The draft plan also calls for the creation of a data collection centre, but NEPA said it hasn’t been established either. Another major part of the response plan is public education, which is included in two of its four components. But eight years later, five of six fishermen CPI interviewed in three of the parishes badly affected by sargassum said they had never heard of the document. The only one familiar with it — Devon Malcolm, the secretary of the Half Moon Bay Fishermen’s Co-operative at Hellshire Beach in St. Catherine — said he’s attended several public sensitisation sessions with NEPA and the C-CAM, a non-governmental organisation that promotes conservation in Jamaica.
But despite such sessions, Mr. Haye, the C-CAM scientific officer, said that it’s challenging disseminating information about sargassum to all the fishers who need to know about it because they’re not all located in one place and do not subscribe to the same type of media. Fisheries Minister Floyd Green conceded that the government needs to do more to educate fishers about sargassum and to protect them from its negative effects.
“There has been limited support provided over the years when these reports come in, in terms of support to help clean up, but we definitely could do a better job in that regard,” he said. Despite the fishers’ struggles, he noted that Jamaica has not been affected by sargassum as badly as many other countries in the region. The assistance the government does provide fishers often is not specific to sargassum, he added: Instead, it addresses the general problems affecting their sector, which also include warming waters and overfishing. “What we have looked at is a more global context, in terms of some of the bigger issues affecting fisheries,” he said. “You know sargassum is one of the climate-related issues that faces our fishers. … When you combine them, they have really brought a heavy toll on our nearshore fisheries.” Government support for such issues, he said, has often focused on helping fishers move further offshore by providing training in long-line techniques and related equipment such as GPS devices.
Huge losses, little help
Mr. Haye, however, also lamented that resources are lacking “to compensate fishers” in Jamaica “for any natural disaster event,” let alone sargassum. Additionally, he noted the challenge to “quantify and determine who has been affected and how, and what level of compensation they require.” But fishers are quick to count the cost of sargassum. At the Bluefields Fishing Beach in Westmoreland, located in the south of Jamaica, Kevin Lattibudaire estimated that a major influx of sargassum can cost him up to about $1,300 to $1,900 a month in lost catch. Mr. Osbourne, the Portland Cottage fisherman, said he has seen sargassum irreparably damage up to 100 pounds of fishing net worth almost $8 a pound. Portland Cottage fisherman Icallie Swaby added that the seaweed has affected his boating equipment. “When it goes into the engine foot, your engine foot can’t turn and it mash up the engine, making it overheat,” Mr. Swaby said.
And during the worst of any sargassum season, fishers may be unable to go out to sea for days at a time. Mr. Green said the government has not been able to fully determine the cost of the sargassum impact, and so it depends on anecdotal information from affected fishers to assess each season and determine a plan of action. “Oftentimes, [the fishers’ clean-up] process is not a costed process,” he said. “They do it themselves.”