Efforts to increase seafood exports in the Middle East and Europe
Efforts are underway to help Somalis make better use of their 3,300km coastline – the longest on the African continent – by increasing fishing and seafood exports to lucrative markets in the Middle East and Europe.
In 2013, the European Union will spend US$6.5 million to help Somaliland pursue its long-term goal of netting 120,000 tons of seafood each year, the sale of which could generate $1.2 billion in foreign currency.
“In Somalia, people have lived for a long time with their backs to the sea,” says Isabel Faria de Almedia, the EU development chief for Somalia. “It’s a country of agro-pastoralists with a strong nomadic tradition. We think there is a huge potential for the consumption and export of fish.”
Until the second half of the 20th century, few Somalis outside fishing communities consumed fish and the sector was entirely artisanal in nature. This began to change in the 1970s with the development of better cold-storage facilities and the creation, with Soviet help, of an industrial fleet. But for want of spare parts and maintenance, these vessels quickly fell into disuse.
In the middle of the last decade, Somali fishermen complained they were being forced into piracy by foreign trawlers operating illegally in waters claimed by Somalia.
Coastal Somalis recount as a “eureka” moment the time self-appointed coastguards impounded a foreign trawler and levied a fine on its owners; they quickly realized seizing vessels was more lucrative than competing with commercial vessels for dwindling fish stocks.
For years, the United Nations has said that tackling Somali piracy should involve creating work for the jobless young Somalis who board skiffs, armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, to hunt vessels on the high seas.
Somalia’s new president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, says he wants to “increase local food production to end poverty forever”. Some 2.1 million people in the country are faced with hunger, particularly in the turbulent south.
The future of large-scale fishing in Somali waters is tied up in a legal dispute over how far these waters extend from the country’s coastline. While the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Somalia ratified in 1989, establishes 12 nautical miles from shore as an international norm for states’ territorial waters, Somalia has asserted sovereignty over seas up to 200 nautical miles from the coast. Mogadishu has resisted international pressure to declare these outer waters an exclusive economic zone, a designation that confers numerous rights to the country but falls short of full sovereignty.
Source : IRIN