By Isaac Lahai Lamin

Sierra Leone’s position in the West Africa sub region is enviably strategic. Within a tropical region, Sierra Leone is suitably located at the endpoint of the Mediterranean Sea. The country is also endowed with several estuaries providing vast opportunity for marine ecosystem. Within the western zone, the Rokel River is identified as an instrumental estuary drifting in major parts of the Western Area of Freetown.

There are also the Ribi river, the Great Scarcies, and the Little Scarcies. In the confines of these intertwining waters are varieties of marine animals, buoyant and fascinating. They provide a fine balance of mammalian ecosystem, with high economic and food value to the population. This value of marine animal production has symbolic opportunity to the people and country, serving as “a profit-earning operation (following the Casamance example)”. It represents a mean to create new jobs and to earn money. It also provides a way to develop an industrial and commercial activity for exportation.

In the year 1980, studies conducted in Sierra Leone by a mission from Cote d’Ivoire, a Francophone West African country, identified the potential of an increased shrimp production to 2,000 metric tons yearly, based on industrial activity that was on-going in the Sherbro Island. Shrimps are just a drop in the ocean and rivers of marine animal abundance that Sierra Leone is endowed with.  Sierra Leone waters provide one of the finest and most expensive fishes that the world has seen in marine history. Gold fish, henry, tilapia, tuna, salmon, catfish, herring and dozens of other fish varieties reside in the sea and estuaries of Sierra Leone. Yet, in the midst of this marine fish abundance the population recurrently faces severe fish shortages on a yearly basis. Fish scarcity results in a hike in prices making it excruciatingly difficult for the average Sierra Leonean to quench his or her fish-consumption quest. Revenues from the marine sector keep dwindling during shortages.

The problem of fish shortage has been blamed on overfishing and illegal poaching from foreign vessels on the shores of Sierra Leone. In adopting solution to this life-threatening new crisis, the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources adopted a policy that led to the imposition of a one-month ban on fishing activities in the ocean as a means to recoup fishes intended to continue on a yearly basis. The approach provided relief to the prevailing fish scarcity in the western area of Sierra Leone. Following the “waiting period” large number of fishes are caught by local fishermen and foreign companies from China and other countries operating large fishing vessels in the Sierra Leone Ocean. An overall increase in revenue for government and market supply became the obvious product of such eclectic move. But the results were merely transient with no lasting effect in the market and the demand from the citizenry. In the year 2023, the ban was not instituted, according to a spokesman from the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources. Currently, fish scarcity remains obvious across the western area resulting in price hike.

While overfishing and illegal poaching appears valid explanation for fish depletion and scarcity, little or no attention has been paid to other unnoticeable culprits: debris, plastic wastes and ghost gears. These foreign materials disrupt the marine and coastal ecosystems designed by nature to provide wide range of priceless services and values for vertebrate and invertebrate organisms living beneath the ocean and rivers and for human wellbeing. Four types of plastic debris are identified within the water body. These include megaplastics, macroplastics, mesoplastics and microplastics. They contain plastic manufactured commercial products. The other large sizes degenerate into microplastics that are ingested by marine animals resulting in their deaths. In Sierra Leone, debris washed into the ocean consists largely of packaged water plastics, bottles and a concoction of wide range of abandoned materials. They are washed into the ocean and river from the top of the hills during the rains through open streams and drainages.

Apart from the debris infiltrating the marine terrain, ghost gear happens to be the deadliest instrument silently decimating the lives of fishes, way after its official use. Fishing gears such as fishing nets are abandoned in the sea and river deposited by fishermen, or left behind when they are hooked to objects in the sea from large vessels. These nets continue to trap fishes in their thousands without the knowledge of those who abandoned them in the sea.

The problem of ghost gear is accorded less attention particularly in West Africa, and the situation is egregious in the West Africa Sub-Region where the mass of the populace – fishermen, community stakeholders, and rural settlements around rivers and lakes – do not consider it a major deadly weapon of marine animals. The world is currently mounting actions to curb the menace of ghost gears in the ocean and rivers in many regions of the globe. The action is less likely to have rigor and vitality in the West Africa sub region. Sierra Leone in particular remains silent about ghost gear amounting in hundreds of thousands in the ocean and the Freetown River and Rokel estuaries.

While the government, through the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, institutes a one month ban on fishing as recouping measures, they must pay maximum attention to foreign debris, and particularly emphasising ghost gears. They must endeavour to reduce or eradicate these foreign killer substances from the ocean and rivers in order to save the population of marine animals. In this way, the fish scarcity and corresponding price hike will be swept aside with positive impact on the lives of the ordinary Sierra Leoneans and the country.