THE DISAPPEARING SENEGALESE SARDINES
‘If there’s no fish, we lose. And our children won’t eat’
Sunday is a working day like any other in Thiaroye-sur-Mer, a fishing village long since swallowed up by the urban sprawl of Dakar. The tarmac road down to the seafront in the downtown suburb of Senegal’s capital quickly gives way to sand; motorized traffic morphs into horsedrawn carts which carry women with buckets stacked high with fish. Along the side of the road dust rises between flocks of brown sparrows, piles of rubbish and watchful stray cats.
Down on the quay, racks of salted and drying sea creatures – lumps of crustaceans and rubbery squid, snappers and rays – stand against the backdrop of a flat, deep blue Atlantic Ocean. Half a hammerhead shark, sliced head to tail, lies on the ground; three one-metre-long captain fish, faces frozen into a final gasp, come past on a wheelbarrow.
Hundreds of women make their living here. At the entrance, someone is scaling a charred fish, working through a small pile of sardinella, or yaboy in local language Wolof. She’s been here since 7.30am and seems dejected. ‘The water is not bringing much fish. Everything is expensive,’ she says.
Diaba Diop, who heads up a women’s association for fish processors (or transformatrices as they are known here) explains that fishers are selling their catch elsewhere. ‘Fishmeal factories are offering a good price for yaboy – three times what we can pay.’
Abby Batoujoy learned the trade from her mother-in-law. For 40 years, she made a good living, enough to feed and educate her six children. ‘It was good in the past,’ she says, ‘but it doesn’t work any more, ça ne va plus.’ These days you might go for a week without seeing fish. ‘We sit and wait.’
‘If there’s no fish, we lose,’ says Diaba. ‘And our children won’t eat.’
In the last five years, fishmeal factories have multiplied along the coast of West Africa. They are in direct competition with the women in Thiaroye-sur-Mer for yaboy, a small oily pelagic fish in the sardine family. Senegal had five factories in 2015 and eight in operation by 2019. Across the border in Mauritania there are 35 more. The yaboy – already a dwindling resource – are being pulverized into fish oil and fishmeal, along with other small pelagic species like bonga and horse mackerel, for a powerful global feed industry, valued at $6.9 billion in 2019. Fishmeal factories are not new (Dakar has
