By Sainabou Sanneh
Women Fish vendors at the markets still lament the high cost of the fish basket they are buying from the fishermen, saying is not favourable to them as sellers and to the buyers as consumers.
A fish vendor, Sally Jeng, said the price they are selling nowadays is not plausible looking at the amount they usually buy the fish basket to resell.
“At times we buy fish at a very high price which we also manage to sell at a reasonable price for little profit still customers are adamant about this, they do not understand our problem with fishermen, they always want to buy at their price.”
Sally mostly sells grey fish or red sniper, which according to her basket is very expensive, especially since there is no price control in the market which is a major challenge to them.
On every market survey, fish vendors complain that they are feeding from hand to mouth without any savings.
Harri Sowe also a fish vendor said she has been selling fish for quite a long time but now things are very different compared to the past.
She added that if the basket of fish keeps increasing then feeding will also be very expensive, especially in these windy conditions fishermen will sell a basket at their price not considering the vendors.
“I wish everything goes back to normal we don’t know expensive feeding in the Gambia and if this continues I don’t think we the poor people will have room to survive,” she said.
Meanwhile, Isatou Gassama unlike the two other vendors said she prefers selling catfish to other classes of fish because with catfish she said one can regain the money spent.
Highlighting the challenges she encounters in the daily fish business, Isatou said “Transportation is my main challenge because most of my customers wait for me but when am late to get to the market on time my customers will go and catfish are different from other fish which can be kept for the following day. So when this happens it becomes lost and the fish gets rotten”
