Get rid of 4000 canoes from our seas to safeguard future of our fish - Prof. Akpalu

The Director of the Environment and Natural Resource Research Initiative (ENRRI – EfD Ghana), Prof. Wisdom Akpalu, has said that to be able to ensure that the country’s fishing areas continue to be productive enough to give us fish, then least 4000 canoes currently operating on the seas should be gotten rid of.

He explained that with so many canoes out on the seas catching fish, it does not allow the fishermen to derive the best benefits in their catch from the fish, as well as safeguarding the future of fishing.

He said that the notion that the sea can never dry, fueling the erroneous belief that there will always be fish in the sea to catch, is what is pushing too many people to fish - even the smallest fish.

This, he said, endangers the future of the fishing sector and the best way to protect this future is to ensure that the 70% dominated artisanal (small) fishing sector, must be control or reduced.

"Currently we have almost 13,000 plus canoes that are catching fish in our waters but if you do the mathematics, if you do the computations, we only need 9000, or 9200 thereabout if we want to derive the maximum profit or benefit from the fisheries. In other words, if we want to have the number of canoes that will generate the number of benefits for us, so that we don't catch too much of the fish, then we need only around 9000. So which means technically, 4000 plus canoes are not supposed to be there at all," he explained.

Prof. Wisdom Akpalu, who is a Fisheries Economist and the Dean of the School of Research and Graduate Studies at GIMPA, made this known during a presentation at a roundtable discussion on Fisheries Regulation and Enforcement in Ghana at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA).