Sea Shepherd started in 2016 to work with governmental partners in Africa to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated - aka IUU fishing. Campaigns have been conducted in seven African countries including Gabon, São Tomé & Princípe, Liberia, Benin, Tanzania, Namibia and since this year The Gambia. The fight against IUU fishing has become crucial as our huge appetite for fish and the ruthless endeavours of profit-seeking companies and governments have been growing exorbitantly, leaving our oceans and its inhabitants exploited and at the brink of extinction. It’s estimated that IUU fishing accounts for 15-40 % of the global catch and includes but is not limited to offences like stealing fish from national waters without permits, taking more or different kinds of fish than their license allows, ignoring restricted or protected marine areas, overstepping the catching quotas for particular species, using prohibited (and often highly indiscriminate and damaging) fishing gear, and catching high amounts of non-target and endangered species like sharks, dolphins, turtles, whales and rays. If current trends continue, then many of the world's major fisheries will collapse by 2048.

Unfortunately, developing countries like the coastal states of West Africa are especially vulnerable to IUU fishing. Having emptied their own national waters due to excessive fishing already, fishing fleets from all over the world - but mainly from Europe and China - started coming to Africa to take advantage of the continent’s rich fishing grounds and exploit those countries and their labor force. With the modern industrial fishing technologies we have today, such as bottom trawls, purse seine nets and fish aggregation devices (FADs), these fleets can easily strip African coastal waters bare if sustainable practices are not respected.

Although many of the African countries that Sea Shepherd cooperates with do have laws against illegal fishing in their national waters, their economic resources are limited, which results in a fatal lack of monitoring, control and law enforcement. In The Gambia for example the government established a nine-nautical mile Special Management Area that is strictly reserved for artisanal fishermen. The Gambia also banned shark finning in its waters and has strict regulations on net mesh sizes, licences and by catch handling. However, the Gambian Navy goes on patrol only once a month - every month on the same day, same time. This poorly exerted surveillance of course allows unscrupulous fleets to operate with complete impunity, decimating local fish populations, overstepping laws, and destroying marine habitats.

This means that industrial trawlers routinely come into the nine-nautical mile exclusion zone to fish, which was originally established to conserve the country’s abundant biodiversity created by the nutrient-rich Gambian River meeting the Canary Current right off the coast of The Gambia. Incoming industrial vessels run over the nets of artisanal fishing boats and contribute to the rapid decline of local fish populations like Sardinella and other small pelagic species. This is devastating considering that the livelihoods of over 200,000 Gambians depend directly and indirectly on these local fisheries and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) believes that more than 46% of the assessed fish populations in the Eastern Central Atlantic are already experiencing overfishing.

Sea Shepherd aims to combat IUU fishing by providing the use of civilian offshore patrol vessels so that authorities can enforce fisheries regulations and conservation laws in their sovereign waters. The incentive and focus of Sea Shepherd of course is the protection of marine wildlife and the conservation of oceanic ecosystems. Stepping onto these fishing vessels, however, you become aware of the vastness of the problem. In the framework of global fishing operations illegal fishing offences are often committed alongside crimes like forgery, fraud, tax evasion, human trafficking, and the severe abuse of labour and human rights. Wildlife trafficking has become so lucrative, and the risk of getting caught so low, that it generates more money for organised crime syndicates than guns or drugs. Some of the living conditions we have seen during our patrols in The Gambia were absolutely appalling, with the African deck crew having to sleep crammed into tiny cabins infested by cockroaches, without sufficient hygiene provisions while working long and intense hours.