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Needed: Swift move to restore order in our fishing industry
2008-05-16 09:39:34
By Editor
Available data shows that Tanzania`s fishing industry is wallowing in great mess, thus limiting its potentiality to help the economy grow fast enough and alleviate poverty in the most meaningful manner.
Latest research results from think tanks like the Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF) attest that despite the nation`s vast expanses of fresh and sea water where fishes abound, the industry contributes no more than 10 percent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and employs a paltry 80,000 directly.
Mess to the industry is mainly caused by three major factors. The first is related to illegal fishing practices by unscrupulous agents, who use destructive methods like poisoning, outlawed nets and dynamites which end up destroying breeding grounds.
The disparaging trend is further complicated by reports that even some unprincipled government officials are colluding to fuel the mess.
Second and most serious is the selling of contraband stocks, especially from Lake Victoria to some neighbouring countries where prices are said to be much lucrative.
Those who know the trade argue that fish processors over there are able to pay more handsomely because they are not subjected to high electricity, transport, telecommunications costs as the case prevails in Tanzania.
Third, surveillance by European planes have occasionally spotted European trawlers working illegally in Tanzania`s Indian Ocean Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), over-fishing domestic stocks through their use of superior technology, contrary to international laws.
The combination of these scenarios only end up to deprive the nation of an important natural resource, for the most part providing protein to three quarters of the country`s population, leave alone foreign exchange mintage and multiple jobs in both formal and informal sectors of the economy.
Three remedies are immediately applicable for redress. For one, the Fisheries Act (1970) merits an all round review, so that it takes into account new and even more complicated environmentally hostile human activities which directly damage fisheries.
Enacting harshest penalties for illegal fishing could be one of the deterrent strategies. In the same spirit, international bodies should be consulted so as to seek compensation or if possible the sanctioning of errant trawlers trespassing our territorial EEZ.
The second remedial measure looks a bit more wholesale, as it seriously requires an in-depth rationalisation of the country`s structural economic deficiencies, like relatively high power and telecommunication tariffs as well as fuel prices.
These economic fundamentals do not lend us a competitive edge anywhere on the global market, let alone on a shared water body like Lake Victoria.
Third, because natural fisheries are getting depleted at a shocking speed, fish farming seems inevitable this time.
We are no longer alone in the freshwater fish export business to global markets.
A strong fish farming industry has emerged in Vietnam, China and the Far East.
In order to sustain the goodwill as stable suppliers of freshwater fishes, we badly need new artificial breeding grounds from farms.
Incredibly, Nile perch catches from Lake Victoria has dropped from 750,400 tonnes four years ago to the stunning 375,400 tonnes per annum as of now.
It is only the fishing farms that would keep Tanzanian-branded freshwater fish products afloat in global markets.
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