{UAH} Lake Victoria is in grave danger: Africa’s largest lake is threatened by pollution and overfishing.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2015/03/lake_victoria_is_in_grave_danger_africa_s_largest_lake_is_threatened_by.html

Troubled Waters

Fishing off Gana island.

Photo by Mark Weston

UKEREWE, Tanzania—The night is clear and cool, the pale light of the full moon shimmering on the black water of Lake Victoria. As we emerge from the bay and round a small headland, Hamisi, the crew's leader, stands in the bow and shines a small flashlight toward a cove. Two of the other men paddle vigorously, their wooden oars the shape of long spears. The third uses a cut-off jerry can to bale water from the hull of the leaky wooden canoe.

Hamisi is looking for a place to spend the night, but he is also keeping an eye out for government patrols on the beaches. Normally the patrols operate only in the daytime—it is too dangerous for them at night—but for a few weeks of the year they venture out, armed in the darkness, hunting illegal fisherman. Some shut up shop during this period, afraid of being arrested or having their nets and boats confiscated, but Hamisi, a short, stocky father of five in his early forties, can't afford to stop. "The government tells us not to fish from the beach," he tells me, "but if we don't fish our children will die."

Hamisi's struggle is felt by a growing share of the 35 million people who depend on these troubled waters for survival. Lake Victoria's lethal combination of overfishing and pollution threatens not only the once-abundant fish stocks, but also the fragile environmental and economic ecosystems supported by Africa's largest lake.

Lake Victoria.

Photo by Mark Weston

In the 1980s and 1990s Lake Victoria was the site of a fishing boom. Diners in Europe, Asia, and North America paid hefty sums for the succulent white flesh of the Nile perch that had come to dominate the lake since its introduction by British colonizers in the 1950s. Nile tilapia, which was even tastier, was exported around east and central Africa. Tens of thousands of fishermen flocked to the lake to take advantage of the gold rush. They came mainly from Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, the three countries that border the lake, as well as far-off Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Malawi, and Zambia.

In the 1970s there were 50,000 fishermen and 12,000 fishing boats on Lake Victoria. Today, according to the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organisation (LVFO), the body charged by the East African Community with safeguarding the lake's future, over 200,000 people fish from 60,000 boats, with more than 2,000 new vessels appearing on the lake every year. As outboard motors and trawlers replaced less efficient paddled canoes, the tonnage of fish caught increased tenfold between the late 1970s and the turn of the millennium.

Parts of Lake Victoria can no longer support life.

The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations calculated that in the 1980s alone, the boom created 180,000 jobs in the fishing industry. As well as fishermen there were fish driers, fish smokers, fish friers, fish buyers and sellers, net menders, boat builders, and boat repairers. International donors, keen as ever to jump on a winning horse, funded the establishment of fish processing factories around the lake. The processors cleaned, filleted, and packaged the fish, dispatching them in cargo planes around the world. Today, the LVFO reports that the lake produces $650 million worth of fish a year. Thirty-five million people depend on it directly or indirectly for a living.

Hamisi and his colleagues were among the boom's beneficiaries. Along with thousands of others, they came to the Ukerewe archipelago in the southeastern corner of the lake, a group of 28 islands in whose waters Nile perch, tilapia, and the sardine-like silver cyprinid known in Kiswahili as dagaa were abundant. The fishing boom enabled Hamisi to save enough money to have a 15-foot wooden canoe made. That gives him the right to half of the nightly takings, with the rest divided among the other crew members. When he moved a few years ago to the main island, he was able to rent a room and acquire a small plot of land, on which his wife Amina cultivates the sweet potatoes, maize, beans, and cassava with which she feeds her young family.

After half an hour's fast paddling we alight on an empty stretch of sand. Two of the men and I disembark, while Hamisi and the fourth man, Victor, row back out onto the lake. They drape the net in a wide arc, its apex about half a mile from the shore, and return to the beach. Hamisi and Victor take up positions on one side of the beach; the other two men stand on the other side, one behind the other, facing the lake.

They roll up their jeans, pick up the ropes, and begin to pull. They list back and forth, their movements asynchronous to keep the rope taut. Half an hour into their tug of war with the lake the first fitful squares of net come into view above the surface. The net, which hangs in the lake like a curtain, is weighted underneath with small stones and lined on top with little plastic buoys. As it is dragged towards the shore the panicked fish can escape neither above nor below it, and as the men near each other the net encircles them. It's an effective method, but a destructive one. Nile perch breed near the shore and their young remain in shallow waters until they mature. By raking the shallows, beach seiners catch the fish before they are old enough to reproduce. They also catch the fertile mothers on whose survival the species depends.

By the time Hamisi moved to Ukerewe, the boom had begun to fizzle out. There were too many fishermen and their methods and technologies had become too efficient. Although reliable data is hard to come by, assessments of the situation in Lake Victoria range from the apocalyptic—catch sizes halving in three years, stocks falling by three-quarters in a decade—to the more sanguine, which suggest that catch sizes have remained relatively stable since the 1990s.

What is clear, though, is that with the number of fishermen and boats up more than fourfold since the 1990s, each individual fisherman is catching much less than during the boom years. They also have to work much harder for their haul, clocking longer hours and taking more risks. "You have to go far out into the lake to catch the big fish these days," Hamisi says.

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