There are several rivers, lakes and reservoirs in different parts of Ethiopia that can foster fish farming potential and contribute to the development of Ethiopia. In Ethiopia in all fishing areas most fishermen are organized in cooperatives, representing the communities around the lake, reservoirs on the islands, although a considerable number of individual fishermen are operating outside the framework of cooperatives, simply because it is open access resources.
Taking the significance of fishery for economic development into account, The Ethiopian Herald had a stay with Molla Jegol an agro economist graduated from Bahor Dar University. He said, “Ethiopia has been a landlocked country since 1993, so its fishery comes exclusively from inland water bodies. These water bodies include lakes, rivers, streams, reservoirs and substantial wetlands that are of great socio-economic, ecological and scientific importance. Fishing has been the main source of protein supply for many Ethiopians particularly for those who are residing in the vicinity of major water bodies.”
Molla also said that fish handling in Ethiopia is at its lowest level and remains at its traditional stage. Starting from the collection of fishes from the net or hooks, fish are processed/ filleted on the floors of boats and mostly sold on the shoreline of the water bodies.
He further said that even though fish provides a great contribution to fishing community, it is characterized with low production and underutilization due to, rudimentary and labor-intensive fishing gears, inaccessibility to potential market areas, lack of developed processing technology, lack of government support, absence of strong and well functioned policy, over fishing, illegal fishermen, shore cultivation, deforestation, lack of training and extension services.
Fishery production system practiced with the combination of motorized gill net, traditional reed-rafts, chase and trap and processed in the form of gutting and filleting on the shore water bodies. Even the fishery sector highly contributes to sustaining livelihood of rural fishing community, it is mainly artisanal that characterized with low production and underutilization due to, high post-harvest losses, poor infrastructure and access to fishing materials, overfishing, agricultural expansion and wetland degradation, climate change and invasive weeds, he added.
Fishery is one of the important and renewable natural resource bases for many developing countries like Ethiopia, and the livelihood of many rural communities relies on the sector. Accordingly, fishery is key sector for reducing poverty and it could be considered as a potential strategy because it helps to diversify household income directly and/or indirectly, he opined.
“Historically, Africa’s fisheries’ output is dominated by capture fisheries and the total amount of fish produced from aquaculture is grown from time to time over the past decade. In Ethiopia fish production depends on the inland waters for the supply of fish as a cheap source of animal protein. It can also indirectly contribute by providing revenue for purchasing food for deficient areas. The country has different geological formations and climatic conditions endowed with considerable water resources and wetland ecosystems, including river basins, major lakes, many swamps, floodplains and man-made reservoirs,” he said.
As to him, the fish supply in most cases comes from the major lakes and some reservoirs such as Fincha, Hawassa, Tana, Chamo, Ziway, Koka, Abaya, and rivers in the country.
As to Molla, from local to regional, continental or even global levels, fisheries play important role food supply, income generation, employment creation and nutrition security. However, the Ethiopian lakes are threatened by poor production system with catchment’s deforestation, water pollution and siltation, overfishing, habitat destruction, invasion of non-native species, illegal, unregulated fishing, and poor governance and it is far below its potential.
Improvements in fishery sector highly contribute to sustaining livelihood of rural fishing community and ensure environmental sustainability in Ethiopia.
Fisheries production in Ethiopia is still under-exploited with limited access and supply to fish and fishery products, while the current and future demand projection is increasing in food marketing system. The rapid increases in fish supply required over the next decades will only be possible, if these fisheries are sustained and improved. So, this paper attempts to review the overview of Ethiopian fisheries production system and its challenges in different fish potential areas that help to provide organized information and drop a line that needs an assessment or an intervention to maintain the resource in the sustainable manners, Molla said.
Ethiopian Fishery is a part of the sea or rivers, and fisheries refer to an organized effort by humans to catch fish or other aquatic species, an activity known as fishing. All fishing activities are categorized in capture fishery and Aquaculture. Aquaculture involves cultivating freshwater and saltwater populations under controlled conditions. Ethiopia is endowed with inland waters for fish production as a cheap source of animal protein.
The fish production from a number of water bodies is supporting the livelihood of poor farmers living around water bodies in providing inexpensive, but high-quality protein and diversifying sources of income, he added.
Current fishery production system in Ethiopia is known as the water tower of Eastern Africa, which provides about 86% of the Nile water. The country has a number of beautiful lakes, reservoirs and small water bodies that distributed throughout the country and covering wide total surface area. Rivers Awash and Omo-Gibe terminate in to Lakes Abbe and Turkana, which are shared by Ethiopia with Djibouti and Kenya, respectively.
Fish production system in Ethiopia is based on the principle of open access to resources that characterized with different fishing gears. In fish production system fishing gear technology commonly functioned in Ethiopian fisheries include gillnets, beach seines, long-lines, hook-and-line, and cast nets. In addition to this different form of forms of traps, scoop nets and baskets made of plant materials and wires are also used, particularly in the rivers of Ethiopia.
In all production systems, most of the fish catches from the lakes reach the market by traditional means of transportation without any preservation facilities. Some fishermen hook some of the fish together with a string and carry them by hand to the market for immediate cash income. Others put the fish in a basket, cover them with fresh leaves and carry them by hand. Still others collect their catch in sacks and carry it to the market by hand or on donkeys, taxi etc.
Traditionally, small-scale or artisanal fisheries are used to characterize those fisheries that were mainly non-mechanized with low level of production due to constraints faced. The fishermen were gutting or filleting in the shore of the lake with poor quality.
He further stated that the problems may rise due poor awareness of fishermen on the length of first sexual maturity. In all areas poor fishery resource exploitation emerge due to inadequate legal and policy frameworks and inadequately implementation of existing fishery laws and regulations. On the other hand, cooperatives poorly performed in resource utilization and management that lead to an individual or private fisher are expanding that often accused of being illegal and exploit the resource.
The big challenges for overfishing is uncontrolled and excess fishing practices, using narrow mesh sized nets, lack of government control over fishing and lack of sense of ownership on the resource.
Climate change seriously causes depletion of fishery activities in a certain country. Higher inland water temperatures decline the availability of fish stocks by altering water quality and the trophic status of a given aquatic ecosystems. Sometimes due to rainfall vibration the highest runoff happened in different areas that bring the sediment load in the water bodies.
So, the government should be taking a regular follow up of each fishing activities in different areas related to resource utilization and management. Therefore, the government and other concerned stakeholders must work together on the reducing methods and controlling mechanism in anthropogenic activities and water hyacinth.
Additionally, the sectors line on traditional system with the absence of modern and strong value chain-based fish production, processing and marketing coordination. This all mentioned problems are some of the research gap that needs a critical and proper assessment in all fish potential area to sustain the sector with its grate contribution for the whole economic activities of the country. So, any interested search organization or individual researcher should be conducting the research on indicated direction.
BY MENGESHA AMARE
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 29 MAY 2024
