Letter from Gambia: Fish Farming Is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals? by Ian Urbina, New Yorker, March 1, 2021 (March 8 issue) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/08/fish-farming-is-feeding-the-globe-whats-the-cost-for-locals . . . ... The results were alarming. The water contained double the amount of arsenic and forty times the amount of phosphates and nitrates deemed safe. Pollution at these levels, Manjang concluded, could have only one source: illegally dumped waste from a Chinese fish-processing plant called Golden Lead, which operates on the edge of the reserve. ... . . . Golden Lead (pronounced “leed”) is one outpost of an ambitious Chinese economic and geopolitical agenda known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which the Chinese government has said is meant to build good will abroad, boost economic coöperation, and provide otherwise inaccessible development opportunities to poorer nations. As part of the initiative, China has become the largest foreign financier of infrastructure development in Africa, cornering the market on most of the continent’s road, pipeline, power-plant, and port projects. In 2017, China cancelled fourteen million dollars in Gambian debt and invested thirty-three million to develop agriculture and fisheries, including Golden Lead and two other fish-processing plants along the fifty-mile Gambian coast. The residents of Gunjur were told that Golden Lead would bring jobs, a fish market, and a newly paved three-mile road through the heart of town. . . . ... “Sibijan deben,” he said in Mandinka, one of the region’s major languages. The phrase refers to the shade cast by a palm tree and is used to describe the effects of extractive export industries: the profits are enjoyed by people far from the source.
Nearly a year after the lagoon turned red, a new controversy erupted over a long wastewater pipe running under a public beach, dumping the plant’s waste directly into the sea. Swimmers were complaining of rashes, the ocean had grown thick with seaweed, and thousands of dead fish had washed ashore, along with eels, rays, turtles, dolphins, and even whales. Residents burned scented candles and incense to combat the rancid odor coming from the fish-meal plants, and tourists wore white masks. The stench of rotten fish clung to clothes and was virtually impossible to remove. In March of 2018, about a hundred and fifty residents gathered on the beach wielding shovels and pickaxes to dig up the pipe and destroy it. Two months later, with the government’s approval, workers from Golden Lead installed a new pipe, this time planting a Chinese flag alongside it. The gesture carried colonialist overtones. One local called it “the new imperialism.” . . . ... Behind Manjang’s thick-rimmed glasses, his gaze was gentle and direct, even as he spoke urgently about the perils facing Gambia’s environment. “The Chinese are exporting our bonga fish to feed it to their tilapia fish, which they’re shipping back here to Gambia to sell to us, more expensively—but only after it’s been pumped full of hormones and antibiotics,” he said. Adding to the absurdity, he noted, tilapia are herbivores that normally eat algae and other sea plants. After the wastewater pipe was reinstalled, Manjang contacted environmentalists and journalists, along with Gambian lawmakers, calling the pollution “an absolute disaster.” But he was warned by the Gambian trade minister that pushing the issue would only jeopardize foreign investment. Dr. Bamba Banja, the head of the Ministry of Fisheries and Water Resources, was dismissive, telling a reporter that the awful stench outside the plants was just “the smell of money.” Global demand for seafood has doubled since the nineteen-sixties. Our appetite for fish has outpaced what we can sustainably catch: more than eighty per cent of the world’s wild fish stocks have collapsed or are unable to withstand more fishing. Aquaculture has emerged as an alternative—a shift, as the industry likes to say, from capture to culture. The fastest-growing segment of global food production, the aquaculture industry is worth a hundred and sixty billion dollars and accounts for roughly half of the world’s fish consumption. And even as retail seafood sales at restaurants and hotels have plummeted during the pandemic, the dip has been offset in many places by the increase in people cooking fish at home. The United States imports eighty per cent of its seafood, much of which is farmed. Often, it comes from China, by far the world’s largest producer, where fish are grown in sprawling landlocked pools or in offshore pens spanning several square miles. . . . The biggest challenge to farming fish is feeding them. Food constitutes roughly seventy per cent of the industry’s overhead, and so far the only commercially viable form is fish meal. About a quarter of all fish caught globally at sea end up as fish meal, produced by factories like those on the Gambian coast. Perversely, the aquaculture farms that yield some of the most popular seafood, such as carp, salmon, or European sea bass, actually consume more fish than they ship to supermarkets and restaurants. Before it gets to market, a “ranched” tuna can eat more than fifteen times its weight in free-roaming fish that has been converted to fish meal. ... The result is a troubling paradox: the seafood industry is ostensibly trying to slow the rate of ocean depletion, but, by farming the fish we eat most, it’s draining the stock of many others—the ones that never make it to the aisles of Western supermarkets. Gambia exports much of its fish meal to China and Norway, where it fuels an abundant and inexpensive supply of farmed salmon for European and American consumption. Meanwhile, the fish that Gambians themselves rely on are rapidly disappearing. . . . Manneh told me that he was standing in his front yard, looking out on a litter-strewn highway that connects the JXYG factory, a Chinese fish-meal plant, to Gambia’s largest port, in Banjul. In the few minutes we had been talking, he said, he had watched ten tractor-trailer trucks rattle by, kicking up thick clouds of dust as they went, each hauling a forty-foot-long shipping container full of fish meal. From Banjul, those containers would depart for Asia, Europe, and the United States. “Every day,” Manneh said, “it’s more.” ♦ # Published in the print edition of the March 8, 2021, issue, with the headline “The Smell of Money.” -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#7106): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7106 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81197076/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
