By Tanu Jalloh
Like humans would always need nutrients as in protein from fish and other seafood to grow healthy, Sierra Leone’s economy badly needs its fish and other marine feeds to grow strong and wealthy. Fishing currently represents ten percent of Sierra Leone’s gross domestic product (GDP), a least developed country with a GDP of approximately 1.9 billion USD in 2009, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 2010.
Sierra Leone is yet to fully harness this sector of its economy, making its exclusive economic zone largely vulnerable to poaching and other related sea crimes. Minister of Fisheries, Dr Soccoh Kabia, told TheEuropean Times last year that the country’s annual revenues for the fisheries sector once totalled Le 2 billion (€354,298 euros) but that the sector generated Le 12.5 billion (€2.21 million) in the first half of 2010 alone. Juxtapose inferences in the last two years mentioned above, base them on the evidence they represent, and you might just figure out the potential of an industry waiting to leap.
Meanwhile, fishing is a crucial component in the country’s food security drive, contributing 64% of the total animal protein eaten in the country. By my reckoning, some of these estimates might not be conclusive because of possible leakages and compromised management regime; oversight legal enforcement initiatives have been selfish, to say the least. That notwithstanding, the industry has the potential to exceed its influence on the formal sector of the economy, but again the informal sector would seem unrated in all of this.
In this piece, I have attempted to put a strong case for the per capita food supply from fish and fishery products in the life of Sierra Leoneans and their third world economy, using basic prudential axioms of transparent resource management. Wikipedia, the online repository, has said that “per capita [income] is often used as a measure of the wealth of the population of a nation, particularly in comparison to other nations. It is usually expressed in terms of a commonly used international currency such as the Euro or United States dollar, and is useful because it is widely known, easily calculated from readily-available GDP and population estimates, and produces a straightforward statistic for comparison.”
When placed into context, per capita food supply, in this case, is “the quantity of both freshwater and marine fish, seafood and derived products available for human consumption.” (World Resources Institute. 2007. EarthTrends: Environmental Information,Washington DC). In other words, these data have been calculated by taking a country's fish production plus imports of fish and fishery products, minus exports, minus the amount of fishery production destined to non-food, and plus or less variations in stocks. (Ibid)
Between 2008 and 2009 I was contracted by the country’s anticorruption agency, ACC, to investigate what was depriving the marine and fisheries industry of a huge amount of resources both in kind and in cash. The hypothesis was that hundreds of millions of dollars were being taken away from the economy, sometimes inadvertently. As I set out, I had in mind the prospect of the industry to the wealth of the economy and the health of the nation or vice versa.
Guided by the 2008-2013 ACC strategy (NACS), some of my findings and recommendations still live on. NACS is the national anti-corruption strategy put together under the leadership of the ACC to chart the path to follow and to outline how individuals, groups and institutions can contribute to curbing corruption in the country. These principles were apparently borne by the conviction that no matter the abundance of the country’s natural resources they may be depleted someday, somehow. It was the same belief around plausible resource management that convened the Sierra Leone Conference on Transformation and Development in February of 2012.
According to the Food and Agricultural Organisation’s code of conduct for responsible fisheries, “…aquatic resources, although renewable, are not infinite and need to be properly managed, if their contribution to the nutritional, economic and social well-being of the growing world's population is to be sustained,” (FAO, 1995).
Therefore, the illegal off-shore transshipment of fish products is one of many issues that would invariably call for proper and more solid supervision of off-shore maritime activities in addition to effective monitoring and inspection, including internal audits of the ministry’s estimates and expenditure.
If the country were to go back to the drawing board, I am sure some of the issues they might have to look into would be those of fishing in the inland exclusive zones, which is highly destructive. It involves the use of narrow mesh nets in shallow inshore areas and breeding grounds for a variety of fish or other marine resources. With a standard regulation for the use of minimum mesh size nets, it means the next generation of fish varieties could be saved from bad fishing practices.
On one occasion I noted that one of the situations giving rise to the root cause of maladministration in the fisheries sector might have been created by some natural factors, making it very vulnerable to artificial exploitation. My assertion was informed by a document on the topographic and oceanographic regimes of the West African continental shelf, which observed that Sierra Leone’s waters were characterised by a relatively stable, shallow thermocline lying at ‘mid-shelf’ depth. That has, to a large extent, affected the distribution of fish. Whatever that might have caused to the general effort of proper aquatic management, it is for the ministry-in-charge to ensure that legislation binding the management and distribution of such natural aquatic wealth is enforced.
Marine fisheries play an important role in the economy of Sierra Leone, supporting livelihoods and contributing significantly to food security. So what needs to be done? First of all there should be healthy discussions of the policy challenges that face the country, particularly the prevention of resource looting through illegal fishing of the offshore stocks and the development of strategies to enable the potential wealth of these fisheries to be captured for economic purposes.
Again, I must state here that very little or nothing is being done to publicise neither the 2008-2013 NACS document, nor its revised version. I stand to be corrected, but I think it is one of such strategies still awaiting adequate interpretation by the ACC so that the public and the processes it affects would benefit.
Before you move over to another page in this edition of Politico, let’s imagine what a turnaround effect this may have on the economy if there is a credible unit with relative autonomy to conduct quarterly spot checks for license certificates of all fishing vessels; consult with key stakeholders for the setting-up of a surveillance mechanism for the country’s waters; prepare estimates for the procurement of equipment and vessels for the purpose of surveillance in the national budget; and set a quota of catch for the country’s local markets from every transshipment! While all of this is published and monitored, the economy grows healthy and the nation becomes wealthy.
