Illegal fishing in Somalia

 

Generally, Somalia locates the horn of Africa and its strategic area having the longest inland coastline in Africa. Somalia is one of the country that are highly fished illegally for the foreign vessels due to lack of efficient government which has capability to control its territorial sea perfectly, after the collapse of strong central government of Somalia in 1991 everything became topsy-turvy and the protection of the sea has lost and many foreign countries started to advantage this gap by fishing the Somali sea illegally using abnormal and banned gears which destroy the environment and ecosystem, in addition some ships process the fishes they catch on board and then sell to the world. sometimes, they dump or throw wastes in the sea regardless to its damage to the marine life and environment. these activities are negatively affecting many things including  environment and local fishers.

the impact of illegal fishing to local fishers.

the illegal fishing vessels use very large small mesh nets which catch and sweeps everything in the sea including small organisms and sometimes they come close to the shores and the local fishers employ small boats which may sometimes not reach far distance in the ocean so their catching fish rate was declining because big vessels already took all the things. another big problem that the local fishers face, sometimes the foreign vessels roll the nets that the local fishermen lay in the sea to get fish in it. this pernicious actions really created for a lot of fishers to give up their career and stop it even some who could not tolerate these actions and tried to act against these ships were being named pirates and targeted them as piracy. 

the impact of illegal fishing in Somalia to environment 

illegal fishing happening in Somalia has very serous effect to its environment because these ships use nets/gears which destroy the whole ecosystem including coral reefs which has vital importance to the ecology and this leads food chain interrupt because the fishes that live for the reefs like puffer fish would loss and the entire ecosystem would be in trouble. the wastes that these ships may damp into the sea would also damage the environment as well as the Marine life.

To sum up, it is inevitable for Somalis to get solution for this problems, the most important is developing its Navy with capability and all the necessary access to protect its sea unless these ships fear for capturing and arresting, they would never stop their wicked actions.

By Hassan Abdullahi Mao