Not only has the transport of fish from one community to the next been disrupted, as travel within the country is restricted, but a nationwide curfew has further complicated matters. Citizens have been required to stay indoors between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m., which means fishermen’s working hours are reduced and they miss out on opportunities to catch some species of nocturnal fish that are more active at night.
“That just adds to the cost because if everyone now depends on fish and fish is now in short supply because fishermen can only go out during the day, and can’t go out at night, you can see the difficulties we are facing”, says Dr. Salieu Sankoh, a research fellow and lecturer at Sierra Leone University’s Institute of Marine Biology and Oceanography.
Other government restrictions have been even more drastic. After a three-day lockdown ended on May 6, fishermen in Tombo, an important fishing village near Freetown, were told that only 15 boats could go out to sea that day, due to new social-distancing measures. Normally the number of boats launched from Tombo would be over 100. This news caused a riot in which young fishermen burned down part of a police station. The government quickly removed the tight cap on fishing boats allowed out at sea.
The COVID-19 pandemic is adding to the challenges artisanal fishermen were already facing. Some studies suggest that climate change is intensifying the rainy season in Sierra Leone, during which rainwater dilutes the coastal waters and causes fish to stay in deeper waters. This forces small-scale fishermen to venture further out to sea to get a decent catch, where they must compete more directly with industrial trawlers, and it makes their businesses less financially viable as they must spend more on fuel.
Last year Sierra Leone tested out a new conservation initiative in which it closed the country’s waters to industrial fishing for the entire month of April, with the goal of allowing fish stocks to replenish themselves, boosting the catch of artisanal fishermen. The pilot one-month ban appeared to help local fishers, and the “closed season” was scheduled to be repeated in April 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic delayed it for another year.
“We didn’t have any closed season this year, so the industrial fishing fleets were allowed to fish throughout April, unlike last year when we had a closed season, they were all stopped from fishing, so we can replenish the stocks”, said Sankoh. “So this is another way in which the fishery was affected. But of course the exploiters were happy, because they didn’t have a break.”
Sankoh said it’s hard to tell how much the COVID-19 pandemic has affected industrial fishing in Sierra Leone, as the mostly foreign fishing vessels are allowed to request fishing licenses throughout the year. So far the number of requests is well below the number from the same time last year, but activity could pick up in the latter half of the year.
In the meantime, there is some relief on the horizon for Sierra Leone’s fishing community. Restrictions on movement are slowly easing, and the nationwide curfew will begin each night at 11 p.m. instead of 9 p.m., allowing fishermen the possibility of night fishing, as they can set off before the curfew goes into effect and return to shore in the morning after it has ended.
Watch this video to learn more about the challenges facing Sierra Leone’s artisanal fishers:
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