ROBERTSPORT, Liberia — The sun was scorching hot in the town of Robertsport as James Dayougar shook debris from his nets, which he’d just returned from fishing with moments earlier. His eyes looked bloated, the nets disheveled. With just a few fish in his canoe, James’s day at sea had been a rough one. He sat down by his canoe and folded his arms to speak with Mongabay.
“Whenever they pass … it is difficult to get fish from that entire area,” he said, referring to the industrial trawlers that regularly intrude on fishing grounds within 6 nautical miles (11 kilometers) of shore that are supposed to be reserved for artisanal fishers like himself. Now the government of Liberia plans to expand industrial bottom trawling in the country, authorizing a new fishery for high-value shrimp worth $80 per kilogram ($36 per pound). Dayougar’s statement expresses an age-old scuffle between artisanal fishers and industrial trawlers in these waters, one that many fishers here fear is about to get worse.
Bottom trawling is a widespread fishing technique in which vessels drag weighted nets and rigid gear along the seabed, scooping up everything in their path. Conservationists say this causes long-term damage to seabed habitats and ecosystem functions, and catches sea life indiscriminately. The Liberian government’s decision to open a shrimp trawl fishery was informed by data collected during experimental shrimp fishing in 2021 and 2022 that culminated in the development of a draft shrimp fisheries management plan.
According to the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Authority (NaFAA), which commissioned the plan from a Canadian consultant and will implement it in some form, revenue from exploiting Liberia’s multispecies deepwater shrimp species will help fund the government’s development initiatives and make up for declining government revenue from the fishing sector as a whole. In April 2024, NaFAA held a workshop in Monrovia to unveil the plan to stakeholders and the public. The agency has made little additional information available since then.
Artisanal fishers accuse industrial vessels, which have a far greater catch capacity than their own canoes, of dumping unwanted and sometimes dead marine life back into the ocean. They say this causes the fish they target to run offshore into deep water, out of their canoes’ range. “When the shrimp fishing starts, I am afraid, we may not get fish enough to buy and sell to cater to our family,” Dorcas Weah, a fishmonger in Marshall, a small but bustling fishing community in Margibi county, told Mongabay in February.
Weah, who started as a fishmonger some 25 years ago, said she thinks permitting shrimp trawlers to compete with artisanal fishers will be detrimental to her survival. “The trawlers are never satisfied,” she said. “When they start to get the [shrimp] they want, they will keep coming to areas reserved for artisanal fishermen.”
Marine resources underharvested
Liberia’s fisheries sector provides a significant source of protein for about 80% of the population. The country shares fish stocks with other West African countries like Guinea, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. A January 2024 stock assessment conducted by Moroccan scientists determined that Liberia has a healthy fisheries sector with a fish stock of about 354,000 metric tons in its waters, according to findings released by NaFAA director general Emma Glassco.
“Findings from the stock assessment revealed that Liberia has got more bottom-dwelling species which presents enormous prospects to grow our revenue base,” Glassco said in a local radio interview in Monrovia.
According to the draft shrimp management plan, there were around 32 industrial vessels fishing in Liberian waters as of March 2024, 11 of them Chinese, Spanish and Norwegian trawlers. Apart from the experimental fishery, shrimp harvesting has been limited to small amounts of bycatch for years, according to NaFAA’s director of marine fisheries, Solomon N. Daryoue.
However, the draft shrimp management plan notes that the experimental fishery “has already biologically and economically over-exploited the scarlet shrimp resource,” referring to the main shrimp species of six to be targeted. It recommends allowing a single trawler to fish 72 to 74 days annually, much less than the estimated 212 days the three vessels in the experimental fishery collectively worked, in order to let the shrimp stock regenerate and collect data to inform future management decisions. It also urges the government to manage the shrimp fishery in a sustainable way that maximizes government revenues over profits for foreign companies and considers the livelihoods of artisanal fishers.
NaFAA hasn’t announced any particulars about how it will implement the plan, including how much shrimp it will allow the new fishery to exploit, when the trawling would begin, or how it would be regulated. Daryoue confirmed to Mongabay by phone that the agency hasn’t yet approved any shrimp fishing and is considering allowing just one vessel.
Competition for livelihoods
Liberia’s fisheries sector is heavily dependent on small-scale fishing. For many rural families, small-scale fisheries remain a backbone for food security and income, and their only means of survival. These fishing communities have already been on edge for nearly a year because of a separate NaFAA plan, first announced in May, to implement a seasonal fisheries closure, or close season, for the first time. The move would align Liberia with an initiative of the Fisheries Committee for West Africa (FCWC), a fisheries management organization, to reduce overfishing regionally by getting its six member countries to implement close seasons. NaFAA has yet to release much information about the close season plan, prompting widespread unease among fishers that the agency’s new plan to begin an industrial shrimp fishery is now compounding.
The Liberia Artisanal Fishermen Association (LAFA), the umbrella and advocacy organization for small-scale fishers, has expressed consternation over the shrimp plan. It casts the move as a threat to the livelihoods, safety and food security of Liberia’s more than 57,000 artisanal fishers, as well as to the country’s marine life.
In a June 2024 letter addressed to Glassco, NaFAA’s director general, LAFA said the move would allow industrial trawlers to gain access to fishing grounds within the 6-nautical-mile inshore exclusion zone reserved for artisanal fishers, would increase competition with artisanal fishers, and almost certainly result in more dangerous collisions between industrial and artisanal vessels.
Conflicts between trawlers and artisanal fishers are already widespread. Artisanal fishers have levied various allegations against trawler operators, including the destruction of their nets and encroachment into the inshore exclusion zone. They also complain that the noise and vibrations from the vessels dredging chases the fish away.
For James Gaye, an artisanal fisher in Marshall, whenever discussions about the imminent industrial shrimp fishery arise, fresh memories of encounters with industrial trawlers come to mind. “On so many occasions, the trawlers will ignore the 6-nautical-miles restriction and come close to our side to fish and entangle our nets,” Gaye told Mongabay.
