This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - You Might Also Like: The Catch

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Introducing S5 Part I: A Legacy of Colonialism from The Catch.Follow the show: The Catch Small pelagic fish off the West African coast are being scooped up in large numbers and ground into a product called fishmeal. This fishmeal is then used to support animal production and aquafarms around the world.How is this industry impacting local fishers? And what does this mean for the global supply chain? Host Ruxandra Guidi partners with Gambian reporter Mustapha Manneh to look at fishmeal production in both the Gambia and Senegal for Season 5 of The Catch. Other voices in this episode include Sally Yozell, Senior Fellow and Director of the Environmental Security program at the Stimson Center and Dr. Ensa Touray, a historian at the University of The Gambia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to [e-mail].

Climate change is battering California. Wildfires, heat waves, droughts, floods, sea level rise, they're all getting worse. That's why the Golden State is burning less oil and gas and investing in renewable power. I'm Sammy Roth. I've been reporting on energy and climate change in California and across the American West for a decade. I've seen firsthand how these stories touch lives, livelihoods, and landscapes. Sometimes for worse, sometimes for better. From the Los Angeles Times, this is Boiling Point. I'll be asking scientists, politicians, activists, and journalists the same questions.

What are the challenges we face to building a better world? And what are the solutions we need to embrace, even when it's hard? Boiling Point will be available everywhere you listen to podcasts starting January 16. How are business leaders working to confront climate change? For that answer, listen to the award-winning Climate Rising podcast produced by Harvard Business School and hosted by me, Mike Tawfel, a professor at HBS. Each episode, we share a

behind-the-scenes view into how startups and the biggest businesses like Microsoft, Google, and seventh generation are tackling the central issue of our era. Check out Climate Rising, wherever you get your podcasts. it rising wherever you get your podcasts. I'm standing in line to board a ferry alongside at least a hundred other people. With me are Rosie Julin, our producer on The Catch, and Mustafa Manay, a journalist and activist from Kartong in the Gambia. Naturally, the three of us are looking forward to being out in the water. This is a podcast about fisheries and fisher people

and their love of the ocean, after all. But that's not what we're out to see today. We're headed to Gore, a small island in the Atlantic, only a 30-minute ferry ride from Dakar, Senegal's capital. Gorée is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for a very grim reason. Until the 19th century, Gorée was believed to be one of the largest slave trading centers in Africa. During the so-called Scramble for Africa, the European empires of Portugal, Britain, France and the Netherlands claimed entire regions of the continent, looting and exploiting

it for their own benefit. This theft included people. An estimated 500,000 enslaved Africans passed through Gorée. In total, roughly 12 million Africans were forcefully taken from their homes. They were taken to the Americas as part of the 19th century transatlantic slave trade. You may be wondering what does the history of colonialism and slavery have to do with fisheries? Much more than you can imagine because that legacy of theft continues today in many ways.

In how governments manage or don't manage their coastal areas. In how other countries take advantage of West African fisheries. And in how local fishers have fewer and fewer opportunities to make a living. But also, that legacy lives on in all the ways that fishers are fighting back. You're listening to The Catch, a podcast from Foreign Policy about the seafood we eat and the impact it can have on our world. I'm Roxandra Guidi. Welcome to season five from the coast of West Africa, the Gambia and Senegal, episode one, a legacy of colonialism. Gorée is a beautiful little island, with colorful colonial buildings and swaying palm

trees. There are no cars here, so you have to walk down these narrow alleys that remind you of 16th or 17th century European villages. Soon enough you realize the colorful buildings were the elegant homes that used to belong to the slave traders. You keep walking to the eastern part of the island and come across a circular building, like a fort. It's the Misson des Esclaves, the house of slaves, which wasn't a house, but a prison.

And now it's a museum. As with their female counterparts, complete records of the names of enslaved men on the island have not survived, but we do know that many of these men came from the interior of Senegambia and were brought to the island to do the hard work of building forts, roads, and houses. This is from one of the first interpretive signs I find inside the museum about how most slaves who came through this prison were men from Senegambia or modern day Senegal, Gambia and Guinea Bissau, a region that once extended

from the Senegal River in the north to the Gambia River in the south, where a reporting partner Mustapha is from. We have men who don't have the 60 kilograms. We call them time-saving inapt. Gore is a sobering place. Its tiny cells have no windows. And its proximity to the ocean reminds you of its sole purpose, as a place where humans were held against their will before being shipped across the Atlantic.

The young girl was the best-seller. their will before being shipped across the Atlantic. As we leave the House of Slaves, a guide is describing the brutal conditions that men and women endured here. We're surrounded by tourists. More than 200,000 people visit here every year. It's difficult to be here. It's something you feel viscerally. But understanding the legacy of slavery and exploitation of West Africa is key to understanding fishing in this region today.

We'll get there. For now, let's take a minute to explore the deep connection that people here have to the ocean. We start in the Gambia. Africa as a center and original human civilization. Africa as a center and original human civilization. African people did not only excel in the establishment of political institutions and governance. This is Dr. Nsa Ture, a historian at the University of the Gambia who studies traditional fishing prior to the introduction of modern technology.

People of Africa also excel in other areas of human endeavours. He made this documentary alongside his students. It's called History of Fishing in Combo. Fishing in the Gambia is a tradition that goes back centuries. Hello? Hey, doctor. Doctor, doctor. We visited Dr. Ture in Brikama.

Yes. Yes. We visited Dr. Turay in Brikama, a city that's about 20 miles south of Gambia's capital, Banjul. We found him in his campus office, a big air-conditioned room with the blinds down to keep the afternoon sun at bay. Around the 1890s, Dr. Turay explained, the European colonial powers were focused on an agricultural product most of us don't think about too much – peanuts. But back then, it was a big deal – for France, who wanted to process the raw peanuts in its

factories, and also for the British, who wanted to control the waterways to bring those peanuts to West Africa's Atlantic coast for shipping. This is how the land was partitioned between those two powers. If you look at a map, you'll see how the Gambia was literally carved out of Senegal, along the Gambia River that runs east to west. People say that if Senegal were a mouth, the Gambia would be its tongue. At its narrowest point, the country is only 12 miles wide. So if international forces were concerned about peanuts, it was the locals

who cared about the fish. Back in the 19th century, fishing was subsistence work. There was plenty of it along the Gambia's 50 miles of coast. But then the Gambia gained independence from the British in 1965. After the independence, the people of the Gambia were actually benefiting a lot from the sea. And many people could not afford meat, beef, mutton. So you see there had been a massive dependent on the fish as cheap source of protein.

So after its independence, the Gambia saw a big demand for seafood. With that came a population boom. In the 1950s, there were barely half a million people in the Gambia. By the 90s, that had more than doubled. People started fishing because there was a demand. So with the population increase, fishermen started coming from Senegal and some were doing the hook and line method.

What Dr. Toure is referring to here is a method where all they had to do was throw a baited line into the water and voila, they could catch enough fish right there without going out to sea. The practice was so successful that it caused a migration shift. People wanted to live near the ocean and they came in from the north and the south. By 1980, fish numbers began to dwindle, so the Gambian government started regulating its fisheries industry. Fishers also became more resourceful in following the catch further out from the coast, and fishing by canoe became more common.

Okay, this brings us to the present. Dr. Touré resents the fact that most people forget history, that or they don't think about how it shapes the future. I have an interest in Africa a lot and its global relation. And that's why I went into the fishing and said, how were we actually getting our fish products? His question was simple, but it was to answer a larger question. Were they in a new era of unfair treatment from international forces, one that affected fishers in particular? Fishers told Dr. Touré that they were going out to sea, but they weren't catching as much. And what they call was ending up elsewhere. So how are fishers in this region faring? That's what we're after this season of the

catch. It matters because in this part of the world, fishers are up against a very complex set of challenges, many of which we've already heard about in past seasons. In West Africa, fishers are facing warmer waters due to climate change. This in turn is affecting the health and the size of those fisheries. Fishers are also up against overfishing or illegal fishing, particularly by large industrial foreign trawlers. Artisanal fishers also get little support from their government. Both the Gambia and Senegal have an abundance of pelagic fish, like herring and sardines, which live at medium ocean depth. These little fish

are very nutritious, and they are very much in demand by the global north. We'll have more on that in future episodes. In Senegal and the Gambia, fishing is an identity. That's my reporting partner, Mustafa. He's from Kartang in the southern part of the Gambia, but his mother was Senegalese and he spent a lot of time in both countries. You said you only went fishing once. Do you remember? Yes, I went fishing once.

And this is the time when the former president, Jambe, gave boats to communities. And my committee, Cardon, were also giving a boat. And we went once. We are not able to catch many fish. And the following day, I was not able to go. And they have a little accident. And since then, I decided not to go to the sea because I live

in a community where we are surrounded by water, we have the lake, we have the sea and we have the ocean but this really makes people like us to be very scared of water. This experience that Mustafa had is not uncommon. Water accidents can happen often here. Yeah I mean I get the sense that there's this like reverence for the ocean here. Yeah, I mean, I get the sense that there's this like reverence for the ocean here, like the ocean is to be respected. The ocean is what gives you food. But people, people are afraid. I mean, it's a it's a difficult place to work to be in. Yeah, it's a very difficult place because, you know, most people are scared of water because of what happened.

People died. It's so bad. And here also, people associate black magic and devil stuff around the water. And the area where I come from, we don't have lifeguards compared to the tourism area where they have lifeguards. So that also makes things very difficult. So you can grow up close to the sea, but you don't even know how to swim. You'd think that someone who's afraid of the water, who wouldn't want anything to do with fisheries or with the ocean, would be discouraged. But while the waters may scare him, what scares Mustafa even more is to lose this resource, these landscapes.

To everyone here, fisher or not, fishing is synonymous with being Gambian and is a unifying force for the region. It is a culture, it's a tradition, it's a region because people believe in it completely and this is all what they know, this is all what they do. So it means so much to these people and Gambia and Senegal, we are divided by colonial masters but these are the same people, the same culture, the same tradition, the same environment. So you see the land may have been severed but the Atlantic coastline is shared. Fishing and this ability to bring in a haul is not just a shared pride but it is a foundational myth and an important part of the heritage for the people of the Gambia and Senegal.

This is especially true for the Mandinka people. That's Mustafa's tribe or the Serer people. There are families that are known for only fishing. These are people who know fishing. These are people who know the sea. The Serer are known across Senegal and the Gambia for fishing and boat building. Mustafa tells me that it was only 20 years ago when the Serer people were across Senegal and the Gambia for fishing and boat building. Mustafa tells me that it was only 20 years ago when the Serer people were known for their ability to spot schools of fish simply by looking out into the ocean from the shore. But in recent years, the Serer people can't do that anymore.

Across all of Africa, artisanal fisheries provide livelihoods for more than 10 million people. Fish is an important part of the diet for more than 200 million. Fishing indirectly employs so many. There are the porters, who bring the fish from the shore to the markets. There are the carpenters, who build the boats. Fish smokers, who've been doing this work before ice was available, and now there are ice makers, mechanics, and a myriad other informal workers around small ports and markets.

So fish is not just part of the identity here. It is life, and securing access to it is central to the health of this region. Sally Yosel is a senior fellow and director of the Environmental Security Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank. Back in 2020, Sally traveled to West Africa to learn about and support the development of sustainable fisheries. And what she saw in the Gambia was a booming industry, but not the way she expected it.

We saw them bringing in the fish from the coastline. I mean, it was on steroids. These guys just ran. They would jump off the ship with a giant basket. I think it was like someone told me it was like 100 pounds. These were lines of men running to the fishmeal factory where they would dump and then run back and back and forth and back and forth. I mean, those kinds of labor practices would never be allowed in the United States. It was just endless until they collapsed. And

when one guy collapsed, another guy stepped in and took his place. Sally is describing a typical scene today. Fishers coming in with their catch and porters hauling it in baskets to go straight into a fish meal plant. There are more than 50 fish meal plants along the shores of Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, and the Gambia. They process fish for a very specific purpose, to feed other animals and other people far away from these shores. When I go to my seafood store in downtown Washington, DC,

the farmed salmon could be coming from small pelagics, from sardinella or bonga, that comes from the Gambia, that's turned into fish meal or fish oil, and then is flown halfway around the world to salmon farms, whether in Norway or in China or other parts of Europe. And there's just something kind of wrong with catching small pelagics that could be feeding a developing poor community with the protein they need and having it ship halfway around the world to feed other fish that we in the Western

world are eating. Farmed salmon is widely seen as a more sustainable fish. It is farmed after all. We looked into this during our season three of The Catch from Norway, where we visited one of those salmon farms. It's a noisy environment because there are water tanks for the salmon as they grow out of their baby drawers

and into bigger pools full of salt water. Machines drop food into the tanks with great precision. But what I didn't realize as we toured the Norwegian salmon farm was how the fish and its tanks depend completely on the fish meal that probably came from West Africa. Makes you think differently about watching those farmed fish being fed when you realize

the feed itself has been taken away from fishers elsewhere. Norway collects next to China probably the second largest amount in the world for their own fish farms back at home. I just find that incredibly ironic. On the one hand, they're just doing a really great job to combat IEU fishing. On the other hand they're affecting these local communities with fish meal and fish oil factories. Rosie, Mustapha and I went to the beach a lot during our time in the Gambia. Some of these beaches, like this one in Sanyang, about an hour from the capital, were really tourist spots with a resort or two with pretty palm trees and lounge chairs outside. But that's a pretty recent phenomenon. Traditionally this

whole coast belonged to the locals, to the fishers, where they kept their boats and sold their catch. Now that past is barely visible. What are we seeing? Lots of docked boats. A lot of fish nets. Actually there are a few folks out there out at sea but only about four or five boats. This used to be a very very busy place. Alkali. Yeah, so you can you can visibly see all these boats are are left without any use. So yeah. So somebody who might have to leave fishing aside, where are they going to get into agriculture? What kind of work are they going to seek out? So if you talk to many, they will say agriculture

is very expensive to venture into. So the other alternative that is left for them is to migrate. Some Gambians hungry to make a living look for opportunities in Senegal. But more often than not, they'll hope to make it to Europe, aboard a boat like the ones we see docked here in Sanyang Beach. The legacy of colonialism, the disappearance of local fish, the impacts of foreign industry, migration, they're all connected here. And they're part of a cycle that leaves

fishers in the Gambia powerless. It not only takes away their ability to make living but it's taking away their culture. It doesn't need to be this way. So the land that they occupy belongs to the community then community has to decide whether to give them or not to. In our next episode, we'll hear from activists who are pushing for environmental standards and are giving locals a voice. And that's it for this episode of The Catch. Support for this podcast comes from foreign policy readers and also in part from the Walton Family Foundation. Our production team includes

Rosie Julin, Rob Sachs, and Mika Ellison. Special thanks to my co-reporter, Mustafa Mane. If you like what you're hearing, please consider leaving a review and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or head over to foreignpolicy.com where you can listen to our other podcasts and sign up for our newsletter. Thanks for listening. I'm Ruksandra Guidi. See you next week.