ROBERTSPORT, Liberia — “We rely solely on the sea to survive. How can we control it while the sea is closed?” Mamie Freeman sat atop a beached canoe in Robertsport, a busy fishing network in western Liberia. She occasionally glanced at her fellow fishmongers, busy packing the fish they had just bought. She was concerned about a government plan to implement a closed season for fishing.
Not fishing for part of the year could mean no catch, no fish to sell, and no way to support her family. Mamie, whose fiancé is a fisherman, had moved to Robertsport because of the low catch in the capital, Monrovia, where she lived.
meagreShe said she uses the profits from selling fish to support her eight children, including their medical expenses, school fees, housing, and other necessities. Any suspension of income, even briefly, can devastate a family’s meager budget.
Closed seasons (or closures) legally prohibit fishing activities at certain times of the year, either for certain species or types of fishing gear or in general. They are a popular fisheries management tool to reduce the impact of overfishing and allow fish stocks to recover.
But news of plans to implement the measure in Liberia, which the government also revealed in May, have caused consternation in the small-scale fishing sector in the United States. Since then, the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Authority (NaFAA), Liberia’s fisheries regulator, has not released further details about the plan’s implementation, leaving the public with little information, including when the closure will begin, how long it will last, what fishing quotas it will include, or, controversially, whether it will apply to both the commercial sector and small-scale fisheries.
Fishing Ban Sparks Fears Among Artisanal Fishers
In a statement to Mongabay, NaFAA communications director Lewis Konoe said enforcing a closed season could be important for Liberia to allow fish numbers to improve and prevent overexploitation, thus “promoting sustainability,” helping to maintain ecological stability and environmental quality, and benefiting the local economy. Konoe did not respond to Mongabay’s specific questions about the government’s ban plans.
A regional plan
The implementation of a ban in Liberia is being pushed forward with the help of the Fisheries Committee of the Western Gulf of Guinea (FCWC), a local fishing employer with a membership of six West African countries: Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. The FCWC was created in 2007 to facilitate cooperation in fisheries control and sustainable fisheries development among member countries.
In 2022, the FCWC launched an initiative to encourage all member states to take action to reduce regional overfishing, including imposing closed seasons. A key first step would be to conduct marine inventory assessments, an important aspect to inform control decisions and attract investment in the field.
Of the FCWC members, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin have completed monitoring of their fish stocks and implemented closed seasons. Togo conducted an inventory assessment in May 2024 but has not yet implemented a closed season. Nigeria has also not yet completed this phase.
Liberia began assessing its marine stocks in January 2024 and has completed a first phase. The results have not been published because a second assessment is expected to be conducted soon. The assessment should show the abundance and distribution of various species in Liberia’s coastal space.
In May, NaFAA and the FCWC government met to ensure Liberia complies with the FCWC agreement. At the time, NaFAA listed several steps it would need to take before it could enforce any closed season, including holding discussions and raising awareness among stakeholders about the benefits of a closed season; directing fishers toward growth opportunities; and assessing the final results of the fish stock assessment.
“FCWC wants Liberia to leverage its fishery resources for the protection of food and nutrition for as much of its population as possible,” reads a statement from FCWC provided to Mongabay by Kofi Taylor-Hayford, its communications officer. “A closed season is one of the best instruments in the suite of measures to ensure those resources are sufficient in quantity and quality to achieve this.”
The statement said it was essential for all six countries to impose bans because fishermen would migrate to neighboring countries to continue their activities if local restrictions were not imposed. “Consequently, Liberia also suffers losses as Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana close their fisheries, and fishermen migrate to Liberia to fish,” the statement said.
A major problem for all six countries is ensuring compliance with bans and other management measures. The FCWC cannot offer much help as a local fisheries advisory body without an enforcement mandate, the statement said, but it stores data from its vessel monitoring activities “so that member states can act at the national level to enforce compliance.”
Fishermen in Marshall, Liberia, change their catch. Photo by Edward Blamo for Mongabay.
Fighting overfishing
Overfishing has been a huge problem across West Africa, including in Liberia, where it has affected the food security and livelihoods of more than 33,000 people in the small-scale fishing zone whose lives depend on the exchange of fish. The total amount of overfishing in Liberia remains unknown, but the effects of the stock assessment should shed some light after it is published.
Local fishers often complain of declining stocks and competition from foreign vessels.
Eric Pattern, a professor of fisheries at the University of Liberia, said any decision to impose a ban should be backed by a scientific assessment and take into account the livelihoods of small-scale fishers and the needs to reduce poverty and improve food security.
Fishermen and fishmongers Mongabay spoke to in Robertsport expressed deep concern about low catches and largely unsustainable fishing practices. But while they expressed confidence that a ban should increase catches, they did not want it implemented until there was alternative support for livelihoods in the region.
James Logan, secretary of the Liberian Artisanal Fishermen’s Association, said any control measures, including a ban season, must first apply to commercial vessels that catch a large amount of the country’s fish. “Our sea is being overfished because some trawlers are fishing in the 6-nautical-mile [11-kilometer] coastal exclusion zone reserved for small-scale fishers,” Logan said.
“Our fishermen who supply the local market have to travel up to 10 [nautical] miles [19 kilometers] to another region to catch,” he said, referring to the offshore sector where trawlers and artisanal fishermen alike can fish. Artisanal fishers are finding these offshore fishing trips increasingly important as coastal quotas decline, and also increasingly risky as their canoes are designed for calmer waters towards the coast.
“The impact of the closed season can be both negative and beneficial,” said Nimely Doe, president of the Collaborative Management Association, a network-led fisheries management framework in Robertsport. “In addition to conserving fish and helping to increase fish supply, it will have a considerable effect on the well-being of fishers, fish processors, fish transporters, and others.”
The Robertsport Fish Landing Cluster’s renovation centers, whose production was funded by the sector bank, photographed circa 2018. The power is now idle and unused, according to local resources. Image courtesy of Stephen Akester/World Bank. Kula Sheriff, who chairs a fishmongers’ committee in Robertsport, said she worries about the impact of a closed season on livelihoods. Photograph by Edward Blamo for Mongabay.
The lack of infrastructure in Liberia contributes to the difficulty of enforcing a closed season. “For us [fishermen], we don’t think we can live anywhere near the season because we don’t have a cold storage facility to store our catch.
And no other form of livelihood,” Thomas Kiazolu, owner of three semi-commercial boats based in Robertsport, told Mongabay. In 2017, NaFAA, with help from the World Bank through its local West Africa fisheries program, built a fish landing facility in Robertsport with cold storage. At least other such facilities are still in the planning stages along the Liberian coast.
The Robertsport facility was expected to store about 2 metric tons of fish per day and increase employment by 16% as a result of the replenished stocks, as less fishing would be needed if the fisheries were to be harvested.
Amid the overwhelming need for sustainability measures to protect fisheries is the fear of losing income.
“The fish is not enough to kill the fish, but we are still surviving,” said Kula Sheriff, president of a fishmongers’ committee in Robertsport, regarding the current low catches. “It is better that we continue to survive than to have something [the closed season] coming up that could starve us all.”