Dakar, Sénégal, 12 - 23 April 1999

Dr. Daniel Pauly from the University of British Columbia, Canada, was the principal instructor of the course. ICLARM staff who participated in the training course were: Training Coordinator Dr. JM Vakily, Senior Research Scientist Dr. R Froese, Software Developer and Database Scientist Dr. MLD Palomares, Research Associate Ms. CM Casal, and Senior Research Assistant Ms. P Sa-a.

Other resource persons included Dr. Oumou Kalsoum Ly, from Union Mondiale pour la Nature (UICN), Mission au Sénégal, Dakar, Sénégal, and Dr. Guy Teugels, Curator of Fishes, Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Belgium, specialist on African inland fishes.

The course followed the curriculum developed for the previous courses in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and austral Africa, enriched though with some very recent developments (integration of FishBase and Ecopath, FishBase on the Internet, new methods for rapid parameter estimation) as well as new ideas about preserving the information contained in national fish collections.

All course material was prepared in French, as this was the official course language. Participants were provided with FishBase and a preliminary French version of the FishBase book.

As part of the training course computer hardware and general software were provided for the participating institutions in order to ensure that the new concepts and approaches presented during the course could be used to start broadening the knowledge base in the respective country.

As in previous courses, participants were requested to prepare a review of the status of the fisheries resources, and of the research devoted to them. These reports revealed a number of general trends, briefly summarised here.

Three land-locked countries were represented (Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali). The fisheries (floodplain) resources of all three suffered tremendously from the drought period that started in the 1970s and the extent of the recovery is hard to assess, given the scarcity of human resources devoted to fisheries research. Estimation of fisheries potential from stocking of small bodies of water and from reservoirs remain uncertain. On the other hand, clear trends towards smaller sizes within species, and toward smaller species within multispecies assemblages, have appeared in riverine fisheries, similar to the trend described as "fishing down marine food webs".

The floodplains of these landlocked countries was originally regulated by traditional and complex arrangements that evolved over centuries. The attempts by government to suppress these arrangements and to replace them by "modern" centralised approaches led to major disruption from which these systems, now often "co-managed" are only slowly recovering. However, increased influx of fishers from neighbouring countries, declining catch/effort, the size shifts mentioned above and especially the constructions of increased number of dams conspire in threatening the future of these systems.

Information on the inland fisheries trends in the 12 other countries represented at the course was not available. However, it was noted that clear-cut logging (in Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Gabon, etc.) is bound to have had strong effects on riverine fish adapted to forest.

On the other hand, the marine fisheries trends in these 12 countries are well documented and they range from the worrisome to the catastrophic. Thus, the bottom trawl fishery catches of most countries have either collapsed, or failed to increase, despite massive increase of effort. Lagoon fisheries in several countries have been allowed to be devastated by the use of absurdly small meshes (mosquito netting), of fish poisons (insecticides), and the entry of huge numbers of new fishers. This also includes the famous acadja (brushparks) fisheries of Benin, which also added to coastal deforestation (especially of mangrove).

Several reports of foreign fleets having gained access (through agreements with the EU and others) to resources known to be overfished raised the question of the role of developed countries in driving overfishing. However, it is obvious that internal subsidies - however well intentioned - also contribute to excessive effort, as does the continuing exodus of excess labour from land-based activities into fishing.

Another problematic area was the evident lack of implementation, on the ground, of the various treaties and conventions meant to protect the environment or biodiversity. None of the national reports mentioned any such treaty or convention as constraint or guide to development schemes, even in such cases where the environment and biodiversity will be clearly and strongly affected.

Indeed the overwhelming majority of the national delegations needed to be convinced that their governments had signed binding agreements of this sort (the Bodies and Conventions table of FishBase was particularly helpful here).

An enormous amount of work needs to be done in this area, as a convincing connection between high biodiversity and healthy fisheries has not yet been established. This also became evident when later during the course, the role of fish introduction was discussed.

The country most victimised by such introductions was Madagascar, for which FishBase records 31 introduced species, and where an introduced species, Channa striata is doing much damage to the local fauna. The opinion of the country representatives was that acceptance of such species introduction was often crucial to foreign donors, and that national institutions often feel pressured to accept such species, if only to benefit from tangible benefits associated with such introductions (further training, laboratory equipment, etc.)

Here again, implementation of the international agreement signed by the countries in question (that sending the fish, and that accepting it) would help control a practice that not only created much damage, but which prevents evaluation and development of local species.

See the national reports for the local "flavour" of the various trends discussed here.