Illegal fishing killing Ghana’s economy - Statistics

Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has said that the Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in the country has denied the country the much needed tax which can be used to stimulate economic growth.

The service added that apart from killing the dream of alleviating poverty, it also poses threat to the ecology of the country’s ocean.

The GSS said that, the fishing sector contributed 2.5 and 2.3 percent to the Groos Domestic Product (GDP) of Ghana in 2009 and 2010 respectively, adding that it had tumbled to 1.7 % in 2011 and has since never recorded any figure above that.

It further stated that currently, its contribution to GDP is a paltry 1.2 percent from the 1.1 percent recorded in 2016, clearly reflecting a sector that is in terrible distress.

Despite the huge number of people employed by the fisheries sector in Ghana, the country’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture says the industry’s contribution to the country’s GDP has been nothing but disappointing for more than a decade.

More than 10 percent of the country’s 28 million people engage in the fisheries sector. The greater percentage of the nationals who depend on fisheries for livelihood are artisan fisher-folks and others referred to as fishmongers.
The fisheries sector is of strategic importance to Ghana but remains vulnerable to a wide range of tax crimes and other transgressions – including money laundering, corruption, drugs and arms smuggling.

While several reasons can be attributed to this poor sector performance, there seems to exist an illegitimate business that mostly takes place on the high seas between large foreign fishing vessels and local fishermen that renders the country poorer via unpaid taxes and appropriate fees to government agencies.

At the centre of the sector’s poor performance is a practice called ‘Saiko’, which is a form of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing conducted by local fishers who go out in canoes to meet foreign vessels and transport boxes of frozen fish to buyers who mostly wait on-shore.

‘Saiko’ is a Japanese word which refers to ‘something which has no use’. It came about when Japanese fishermen whose nets first caught fish other than what they were licenced for referred to the unplanned catch as ‘Saiko’.

According to Godfrey Tsibu, Deputy Director of the Fisheries Commission, fishing vessels are licenced according to the sort of fish they intend to catch.
But occasionally these vessels catch different types of fish which the law requires must be discharged back into the ocean unharmed.

As such,catches originally did not have commercial value to these vessels, they initially started giving them out to local fishermen who wanted them free of charge – but as demands of the fishermen grew, they started selling the unwanted fish.

Fisheries economist with the United Nations University and University of Ghana, Prof. Wisdom Akpalu, said as the demand of local fishermen increased, some of the vessels made it a business wherein they would consistently deliberately catch these fish, freeze them and later sell to local fishermen on the high seas – which is illegal in itself and by extension, denies the country taxes it would have made on those sales if the transactions were supervised by tax authorities.

The ‘saiko’ catch are mainly juvenile small pelagic such as sardines, chub mackerel and other juvenile demersal fish as well, as it is seen to be an assured means of harvest in the face of declining catches.
For the purpose of yielding the right taxes among other things for the state, the Fisheries Act, 2002, prescribed that fishing vessels must submit a record of their catch, failing which the fishing vessels will have their licences either cancelled or refused renewal or suspended.
Trans-shipment is an illegal transaction wherein large foreign fishing vessels sell fish or cargoes to Ghanaian vessels, boats and canoes at sea, and in this way avoid berthing at the authorized ports and thus evade payment of taxes to government.