Foreign ‘overfishing’ devastates Gambia

BANJUL: Chronic over-fishing, especially by foreign-owned industrial trawlers, is having a “devastating” impact on the tiny West African state of The Gambia, Amnesty International said yesterday.

It estimated illegal and excessive fishing off The Gambia, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone amounted to a loss of $2.3 billion a year, with The Gambia especially badly hit, it said.

This deprives subsistence fishermen of a fair catch and forces up prices for Gambians, who rank among the poorest people in the world, it said.