- Lake Victoria biodiversity is been destroyed by overfishing
- Researchers advice set up of common regulations among EAC states
- Due to overfishing, stock of commonest fish is falling drastically
Overfishing is depleting fish in Lake Victoria with all three countries—Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania—that surround the massive fresh water body reporting a steady decline in output. On the Ugandan side, it is reported that fisheries that mushroomed around the lake region are shutting down at an alarming rate.
“More than ten factories around the lake have closed and the remaining 25 are operating below capacity,” reported Jinja, a Uganda based inter-governmental organization.
On the Tanzanian side, the Department of Economics at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) has conducted several studies on the problem and the findings are pretty grim.
“The depletion of stock in Lake Victoria is part of a similar problem occurring globally with fish stocks being depleted. When access to fisheries is free, too many vessels and too many fishers will use too many nets ultimately depleting stocks,” reads a report by Dr. Razack Lokina, Coordinator of Environment for Development, a research initiative supported by Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) at UDSM.
According to the report, from approximately 10,000 fishing vessels in the 1980s, there are now well over 60,000 vessels prowling in Lake Victoria.
“We have seen clear signs of this decline over the last 20 years … the most urgent measure is that Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, the three countries sharing the fish stocks of Lake Victoria, agree on common regulations,” suggests Dr. Lokina. The lack of common regulations is affecting efforts to stop overfishing and regrow the fish stock.
For example, while Tanzania has introduced a minimum mesh size for fishing the Nile Perch, the most common fish species in the lake, Kenya has not. So what happens is that, while the larger net sizes in Tanzania prevent fishing of smaller fish, in Kenya, fishermen still catch them, defeating the purpose entirely.
“If that (net size regulation) can be agreed unanimously, smaller specimen will not be caught and most important, female fish will live long enough to spawn and secure recruitment of new fish,” the researcher says.
He also points out that; “Equally important is the practice among factories of not paying for fish below a minimum size that had a strong effect on not using too small mesh size among Tanzanian fishers. Unfortunately the same practice has not been applied in Kenya, leading to undersized fish being caught and sold to Kenyan plants by Tanzanian fishers.”
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Overfishing, fisheries offer solutions
Another proposal to turn the tide has been brought up by the researchers, this time seeking to regulate the fisheries rather than the fishermen. They suggests that by controlling the size of fish bought by fisheries, East Africa can control the fishing of small specimens.
“Access to fisheries cannot be free for all. A recent study published in the international journal Science studied fisheries all around the world and found that rights based managed fisheries run a much lower risk of stock depletion,” reports Professor Håkan Eggert from the University of Gothenburg, a residential advisor and visiting professor at UDSM.
“Simply put, any successful management of fisheries includes defining clearly who is entitled to fish and who is not. It means that the number of fishers and fishing vessels must be reduced in Lake Victoria, it may sound unfair but we are all better off if fisheries can be managed sustainably compared to if stocks collapse and no one can fish,” writes Professor Eggert.
Beach Management Units (BMUs) around Lake Victoria
Another approach, the researchers suggest, is the one taken by Tanzania to introduce Beach Management Units (BMUs) around Lake Victoria. The BMUs require that all fishermen using the same beach be registered and regulated through their BMU memberships.
“The BMUs seem to have been successful in eliminating detrimental fishing practices, but we have not been able to identify a clear effect of BMUs on reducing the use of nets with too small mesh sizes,” the professor reports.
He suggests that a necessary step is to limit membership in the BMUs; “when some fishers exit for other jobs or retirement they should not be replaced by new ones,” Dr. Lokina advices.
According to the scholar, open access to fishing means an increase in the number of fishermen and fishing vessels. This makes it harder to regulate and even when regulated it still means more people fishing more fish leading to depletion.
Mark Weston, author of The Saviour Fish: Life and Death on Africa’s Greatest Lake agrees with the researchers. According to Weston, overfishing is serving a body blow to the lake’s fishing industry.
“At the peak of the boom, 2,000 new fishing boats were launched onto the lake every year, using ever more efficient technologies. Despite measures adopted by governments of the lakeshore countries such as banning trawlers and clamping down on other illegal fishing methods, Nile perch stocks have fallen by at least three-quarters,” explains Weston.
The author points out that the average weight of a Nile Perch fished from Lake Victoria has shrunk from 50kg in the 1980s to less than 10kg today. “Although the fish factories persuaded the Tanzanian government to slash the legal minimum size at which a perch can be harvested, many of the specimens on sale in the market are smaller even than the new threshold,” he writes.
The result of fish depletion is a fall in living standards and a rise in social unrest including crime, and overall fall in economic development, the author writes.
“Of the 25 million people who rely on the lake’s munificence, the majority are finding it difficult to make ends meet. Unemployment and underemployment are rife, and many are leaving the lake region…factories are also closing,” Weston reports.
“We depend here on fishing…when there are no fish, there is no money in circulation and when there is no money, we have no business, things become bad,” he quotes a lake zone native.
Weston decries the fact that hundreds of Lake Victoria’s fish species have gone extinct in the past three decades. He underscores the researchers’ findings citing overfishing, deforestation, and pollution as the cause of fish depletion and destruction of one of the most endowed biodiversity environments on Earth.
“The price of Nile tilapia, another popular fish for eating, has quintupled in five years despite increased competition from fish farms in Asia,” he writes.
Much remains to be desired as to the fate of Lake Victoria, the World’s largest fresh water lake. The researchers maintain that policy makers in the three countries must agree on common regulations if fish species and general biodiversity of the lake is to be saved.
