By Sainabou Sambou
After the celebration of the feast that ends the Holy Month of Ramadan, fish scarcity has hit the Tanji fish landed side as the cause is alleged to many ‘bato’ – big boat, in the sea.
Mansur Pui a fisherman at the Tanji Beach emphasized that the cause of scarcity of fish is that there are many (bato) the big boats in the sea and “this is responsible for the scarcity of fish, because this boats catch small fishes but when they do they normally throw them back into the sea ,”
Also, according to him, there are areas in the sea where the fishermen don’t reach. He lamented that when fish is in that side it becomes very difficult for them to get fish and the fish they normally catch is small in quantity and can’t serve everyone.
Owners of those big boats do override their side where they (fishermen with small boats) catch fish and that makes it difficulty for them.
The market price for the basket of bonga fish now, he said is D350. He cited that Sometimes when there is scarcity of fish they normally sell at D700 or D,1000 per basket.
As regarding to selling term, Mansur they don’t sell in credit to costumers but they do bargain and when they agree on price they will buy why fishermen sell “because when we are buying equipment nobody sell to us on credit or give loan to help us.”
Fishing he said, is like other jobs, “sometimes we have profit sometimes we loss it all depend on how you use your fuel to go and catch fish some canoes use 200 liters of fuel or more than that because the canoes are bigger than each other.”
In his own view, Malick Joof also a fisherman said the Chinese are the cause of fish scarcity in the Tanji Beach “because they have this big boats and they normally catch the small fish. We have an area in the sea where we do catch fish but now the Chinese know that area and they also go there and that disturbs us a lot.
Fatou Bojang a fish vendor attributed the scarcity with the Senegalese which constituted larger part of the fishermen. Saying that fish is very expensive now as she normally buy a basket of fish for D5000.
Though she wants the Gambian youth’s to go to the sea and catch fish so that everything will be fine.
