Along the coast of West Africa, global demand for fish is endangering a long-established way of life. Many people in Senegal and Gambia depend on fish for both food and income. But a recent influx of foreign-owned fishmeal factories is threatening that livelihood—spurring locals into a fight for their future.

Metal strikes metal on Sanyang Beach in Gambia. Abdou Kunta Fofana hefts a mallet over his head before bringing it down again and again, hitting screws holding a pipeline in place. His muscles strain with the effort and sweat beads on his forehead as he stands in rushing tide, oblivious to the water soaking his jeans.

“We do not want this factory!” he shouts, breathing hard. The hammer comes down again.

Within a matter of minutes, a small group of men dig the black plastic pipe out of the sand, forcing it from concrete holdings, and discard it, triumphantly, into the ocean.

The wastewater pipe connected the ocean with the Nessim Fishmeal Factory, one of three Chinese-owned fishmeal production facilities built along the 50-mile Atlantic coastline of Gambia, the smallest country in West Africa. The factories buy small fish, including sardines and bonga shad, from local fishermen, and process it into fishmeal—creating a waft of putrid odor that permeates the area, and producing an effluent that pollutes the sea.

These and other foreign-owned factories along the West African coast are creating conflict within local communities and economies, and inspiring the young people who live near them to take action.

Productive fishery draws both industry and the ire of locals

Fueled by global demand, fishmeal is a growing industry in West Africa. Today, three million people work in the region’s fisheries, which generate $2.5 billion each year from legal catches. The area has one of the most productive fisheries in the world, thanks to a natural upwelling system in which cold water rises from ocean depths and flows down along the northwest coast, bringing with it rich stocks of fish.

There are four major upwelling currents permanently swirling around the world and creating some of the world’s most productive fisheries. More info

Fishmeal factories started operating in West Africa during the 1970s and 1980s, when some coastal countries signed fishing agreements with the Soviet Union in exchange for investments in the region. At first the industry struggled to gain a foothold—the first factories in Mauritania closed due to low profits.

Decades later, the industry took off. In neighboring Senegal, for example, fishmeal production in 1967 totalled just 2,000 tons. By 2016, the yield had increased sevenfold, to 14,000 tons, according to data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

As the industry became more lucrative, the first fishmeal factories started production in Gambia.

“The very first evening, when they started their engines, it was a shock to everybody,” says Lamin J.J. Jawla, a business owner who runs a tourist resort down the beach from the Nessim factory in Sanyang. “The stinking smell hit the village. It was a smell we have never experienced in our lives.”

Then in July 2018 the factory was closed down for almost six months because it was not meeting environmental standards mandated by Gambia’s National Environment Agency (NEA). The factory was dumping untreated waste on some of Sanyang’s fields and community gardens, where residents grow vegetables. Within a day, residents say their tomatoes changed color and a foul odor made it difficult to breathe.

While several studies have exposed the harmful effects fishmeal effluent has on fish and other animals in the ocean, there has been little research on its health effects on humans. More info

The community responded by staging a peaceful protest, which temporarily stalled factory operations. The Gambian environmental agency issued the company an ultimatum: stop processing until wastewater is properly treated. By the end of the six months, the company had taken heed and built a wastewater treatment plant. The NEA was satisfied with the water samples they tested, and Nessim got the go-ahead to continue operating.

But not everybody is satisfied. “We’re not even complaining anymore,” says Fofana, the mallet-wielding protester who helped remove the Nessim pipeline in Sanyang. “We are fighting.”

An online petition started in February this year calls on the Gambian government to close all three of Gambia’s fishmeal factories. It lists close to 3,000 signatures.

“All the people here don’t want the factory, because we have seen what it already does,” says Fofana. “It’s not good for our health, it’s not good for our plants, it’s not good for our birds, it’s not good for our fish. It’s not good for nothing.”

The monochrome Nessim Fishmeal Factory looms large behind the brightly-colored fishing boats of Sanyang, as teenagers play soccer with a destroyed wastewater pipe standing in for soccer goalposts. Photo by Abi Hayward

Foreign investors drive lucrative fishmeal business

Locals are even less inclined to accept the downsides of fishmeal production knowing that the facilities are operated by outsiders—foreign business owners capitalizing on the region’s natural resources, but without ties to the community.

The Nessim fishmeal factory is Chinese-owned. “The reason I chose Africa as my investment location is the source here is cheap,” says owner Du Qi Chao. “The price of fish is cheap.”

Du owns two other fishmeal factories outside of Gambia. He says the fishmeal produced by the Nessim factory is exported not only to China, but also to Russia, Turkey, and some other countries in Europe.

Some locals feel that foreign stakeholders are using local resources without regard for local interests. “They do what the foreigners want,” says Fofana. “They don’t do what the citizens want.”

Sharif Bojang is known throughout Sanyang as the person who supported bringing the fishmeal factory to their village. Bojang was the youngest chair of Sanyang’s Village Development Committee, a government-recognized body, before the fishmeal factory came to town.

“I didn’t do it, you know, in ill faith. I did it to support the development of my community, as I did with the other projects,” says Bojang, who counts a library, school, and community center among the projects he has backed. “If development is to come to my community, I will support that development.”

He got involved in the fishmeal factory, where he is now a supervisor, when the company needed local workers. Bojang condemns the activists who dug up the pipe, but he’s in an awkward position because Sanyang is a close-knit community.

“I am in between the community and the factory,” he says. “It’s very difficult for me sometimes.”

Fishermen in Senegal use horse-drawn wooden carriages and colorful wooden fishing canoes called pirogues. Photo by Farah Nosh

A way of life

In the north of Senegal, the first rays of the morning sun touch the sands of Joal Fadiouth, where the tide brings with it a fleet of fishermen in colorfully-painted wooden canoes brimming with the morning’s catch. Waiting on shore is a small army of women who buy and process fish. As soon as the first bucket makes landfall, the beach comes alive. This bustling scene, a riot of color, is the lifeblood of Senegal’s fishing industry.

Down the road, local fish processor Mariane Tening Ndiaye gets a call from her buyer. Ndiaye has been drying and smoking fish her whole life, just like her mother and grandmother before her. Nowadays she is struggling to compete with the higher price factories can pay for fish destined to become feed.

“They are more powerful than us,” she says of the factories buying up the catch.

Buying and smoking fish gives Mariane Tening Ndiaye economic and political power. But as fishmeal factories take more and more of the catch, her livelihood and place in society is threatened. Photo by Farah Nosh

Though women like Ndiaye are losing business to the fishmeal industry, some locals are benefiting from the new economy. “Those who sell their fish to the factories are in favor of them to stay, because [the factories] buy large quantities of fish at a very good price,” says Dodou Kote, a fisherman.

Stoking division

In the south of Senegal lies Abene, a quaint town popular with European tourists, home to emerald paddyfields and twisting turquoise river systems, as well as a close-knit community that was shocked when a fishmeal factory started up operations recently.

The Chinese-owned Société des Produits Halieutiques barely operated for one month in April 2018 before peaceful community protests led Senegal’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development to suspend the factory’s operations. But some members of the community welcome the positive aspects of development that the factory has promised, such as new roads, hospitals, and schools. This has caused divisions in the community, even within families.

Momodou and Seny Sonko are brothers. They sit on an open veranda, sharing fish and rice from one metal bowl, arguing about the controversial factory in their town.

Seny asks why Momodou and the youths never complained when the factory first came to town. Momodou retorts that they didn’t know it would be a fishmeal factory at that time, saying that the owners claimed it was an ice-making plant. They agree on one thing: it smells bad.

The future

Fish is not only central to the working lives of people in the region, it’s also a vital source of protein. “If there is no fresh fish, we eat dried fish,” says Ndiaye, the fish processor from Joal Fadiouth.

The national dish of Senegal is thieboudienne, a hearty plateful of spicy tomato rice topped with vegetables and bony fish, often sardinella. But with a growing West African fishmeal industry exporting overseas, the star ingredient is being diverted from these communities.

“The system as a whole cannot produce an infinite number of fish,” explains Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist that runs the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us project. “So if you take them for exports for fishmeal, then they are not available to be eaten as food for humans.”

That change could have health consequences in a region reliant on the sea for protein. Meat is expensive and bean crops in sub-Saharan Africa are increasingly threatened by climate change as the Sahel desert creeps southwards.

“If a product is eaten by humans and eaten by animals, humans should go first,” says Pauly. “But these humans happen to be African, and they never go first.”

Vultures find scraps among hand-painted fishing boats in Abene, Senegal. Photo by Thomas Smith

The growth of the fishmeal industry comes at a time when West African fisheries are already under pressure from overfishing, a problem made worse by illegal fishing. Six West African nations—Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, and Sierra Leone—lose a staggering $2.3 billion in revenue annually as a result of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, according to a 2017 study published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

“Gradually, we are determined to address those challenges,” says Banja Bamba from Gambia’s fisheries ministry. “It is happening not only in the high seas, but in our rivers.”

Regulations to combat illegal fishing exist, but are weakly enforced. Bamba says that countries, including Gambia and Senegal, are increasingly working together to crack down on enforcement.

The lucrative draw of fishing for fishmeal only adds to this problem. “Maybe in 10 to 20 years, we have no sardinella,” says Alessane Samba, the former head of research at Senegal’s Oceanic Research Institute.

He warns that depleting fish at the bottom of the food chain, such as sardinella, could lead to a collapse of the marine ecosystem.

Research shows that such dark predictions could come true. A 2019 report from Sea Around Us found that 88 percent of West African fish stocks had biomass below sustainable levels and 6 percent of them had collapsed entirely.

Unfortunately, Pauly knows these numbers too well. The marine biologist predicted the collapse of the sardinella fishery further down the coast, off Namibia. By the turn of the century, jellyfish filled the void of the sardinella in the ocean ecosystem, and the fishery never recovered. Pauly says that this was the first system where fish were replaced by jellyfish.

A case of collapse in Namibia Read case study

Oceanic researcher Samba says the collapse of sardinella in Senegal would have the worst impact on the poorest people. Families that depend on the small fish for both food and work could really suffer. He advocates a radical response to the threat.

“The only solution I see is to close all fish feed factories,” he says. “There is no benefit to us. It’s foreign owned and it’s all exported.”

But Pauly notes that the solution is not so simple and trying to turn back the clock could lead to unintended consequences.

“What would the Senegalese government offer to young people that are fishing?” asks Pauly. “Go work in Silicon Valley or go work where? There's no other job. So they have to let them continue to operate.”

Bamba says the factories are here to stay, “I think the right thing to do was not to give them approval in the beginning, but having done that, now you have to support them.”

For people like the protesters in Gambia and Senegal, however, resistance seems like the only way to protect their health, their economy, their agriculture—and especially their fish.

Ndiaye puts it simply: “If there is no fish, there is no future.”

Learn about some alternatives to fishmeal