Declining catches of small pelagic fish and of fish stock assessments in Ghana’s marine waters show that there is an inminent risk of stock depletion, which may put food security and goals for economic growth in fishing communities at risk.

This is the main conclusion of a baseline study conducted by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Ghana Sustainable Fisheries Management Project (SFMP), as revealed by Maurice Knight, Chief of Party, SFMP, at a meeting with Editors and Morning Show Hosts in Accra.

The forum aimed to sensitize participants on the impact of unsustainable fishing effort and other practices that negatively affect the fisheries sector in order to support the SFMP to advance the cause of the industry and reverse the declining trend.

Knight pointed out that SFMP research showed that declining fish catches, increasing reliance on imports to meet demand, a growing fish-trade gap, declining incomes, increasing poverty and declining nutritional well-being were disturbing outcomes for the future of Ghana and fishing communities.

Even though the Government has developed a National Fisheries Management Plan for the marine sector which provided a roadmap for improved management with the objective of reducing fishing effort to achieve sustainable yields, weak implementation of the plan has made it impossible to reverse the declining trends in fish stock levels.

Therefore, the leader urged the government to redouble its efforts in that direction, while pledging the continuous support of SFMP to the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development and the Fisheries Commission in rebuilding fish stocks.

For his part, Kofi Agboga, SFMP Senior Fisheries Advisor, expressed concern about the serial degradation of fish stock levels in Ghana’s marine waters, describing it as a crisis situation which required drastic measures to reverse.

Agboga attributed the situation to weak enforcement of fisheries regulations and, therefore, a dysfunctional fisheries governance system.

He also explained that even though the Fisheries Act, 2002 made it mandatory for the District Assemblies to register and license canoes before they could operate, the law was not being enforced.

This, he said, had led to large canoe numbers and overfishing, citing 14,000 canoes as unlicensed, adding that these canoes were not only operating illegally, but were also engaged in unreported and unregulated (IUU)fishing.

Agboga said industrial vessels were now competing with artisanal fishermen for small pelagic fishing while under-declaring the total quantity of by-catches to the Fisheries Authorities.

In his view, what is needed is standardization in order to check the too many illegalities as well as control the proliferation of fishing canoes.

He said a closed season was a key tool in reversing the declining fish stock levels and urged government to adopt best practices from countries like the Philippines and Norway, and invest heavily in the sector, adding that failure to do so would lead to a collapse of the fishing industry by the year 2030 and turn Ghana into an importer of fish.

All in all, Deputy Fisheries Minister Francis Ato Cudjoe highlighted that a new Fisheries Management Plan would be drawn as the implementation period of the current Plan would end in 2019.

The minister also disclosed that the government would establish Marine Protection Zones to allow fish to spawn and that a task force had been established to undertake vessel inspections, while vessel monitoring systems had also been instituted to enforce compliance with the 30-metre radius rule for artisanal fisheries and beyond for industrial vessels.

To settle the depletion stock issue, the Deputy Minister said that a closed season implementation would be made compulsory in August, feeling convinced that if fish are left for that period, stocks will increase considerably, with one fish spawning up to 10 million fingerlings at a time.