Europe brewed its ‘migrant crisis’
Decades before today’s migrants boarded small boats to Europe to ‘take their jobs’, European fishing ships were trawling West African waters, taking food and jobs from the locals. And they still are
Jaume Portell and Èlia Borràs in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Fish is central to Senegalese life. On Senegal’s shores, fishermen unload their catch onto trucks that drive it inland to the markets where women sell it. Across the land, fish is a core ingredient in thieboudienne, the UNESCO-stamped national dish and cultural artefact.
But a series of fishing treaties with the European Union (EU) have decimated Senegal’s fishing culture and livelihoods.
Three decades ago, people in Spain and Senegal ate about the same amount of fish: 35kg per person per year. Today, Spain’s consumption has risen to 40kg; in Senegal it has dwindled to 12kg, according to data from the United Nations.
Acting as one “fishing nation”, the EU has signed enough ocean-use agreements with countries in the Global South that by 2013, European ships were taking a billion kilograms of fish from beyond EU waters.
The current treaty with Senegal came into force in 2019 and expires in November 2024. It says that as long as the EU pays the Senegalese government around $3.2-million each year, European – mainly Spanish – vessels are allowed to trawl for tuna and hake off Senegal’s coast. This, despite the fact that several species of hake in West Africa are overexploited, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Less fish, more migration
The EU signed its first agreement with Senegal in 1979 and renewed it dozens of times. In one spell covered by those treaties, 1994 and 2008, fish on the
Senegalese market fell from 95-million to 45-million kilograms and the number of local small fishing boats nearly halved, researchers at the Transnational Institute found. They could not keep up with the pace at which larger EU ships with better technology were sweeping the waters.
Senegal cancelled the treaty in 2006.
Then, eight years later, the government signed a new treaty saying that this time, the European ships would not just take the fish away but sell a significant amount of it to Senegalese canneries. This does nothing for small-scale fisherfolk trying to make a living from the sea. Some have since turned their small boats into transport for migrants to Europe, contributing to what European countries bemoan as the “migrant crisis”.
The small boats
These small boat owners charge each migrant as much as $800 for the precarious journey to Spain. Families and friends often collectively raise the amount, expecting that the migrant will pay them back upon arrival in Europe.
In the small village of Arinaga, in Spain’s Canary Islands, fishermen’s boats and canoes pile up in a cemetery next to an industrial area, near the beach, swarmed by a colony of cats. Some still have inscriptions betraying Senegal as their origin. These vessels stand as testimony to the thousands of journeys made between Senegal and Spain by West Africans looking for work. In 2023, almost 40,000 people entered Europe via the Canary Islands archipelago from the coasts of West Africa.
Moudou was one of them. He arrived in Las Palmas, Canary Islands in October.
He used to be a fisherman in Saint Louis, in northern Senegal. He left Senegal on the guidance of his uncle, Mourtalla who had made the crossing years earlier.
Mourtalla was imprisoned for “human trafficking” on arrival in Europe but is now out and working odd jobs in Spain’s agricultural sector.
Despite Mourtalla’s hardships in Spain, both felt that the journey was worth risking. “It is becoming increasingly difficult to fish because of large ships,” Moudou says. He is eagerly looking for a job in Spain because like many others, the pressure to send money back home started even before he left Senegal.
The big wigs win either way
The political establishments whose decisions forced Moudou into Spain will lose little for sticking him between a rock and a hard place.
In Europe, despite populist antiimmigration talk during electioneering, their economies have much to gain from migrant workers.
Spain is a European export powerhouse for products like pork, olive oil, citrus fruits and other fresh produce.
The average age of farm owners in Spain is around 45. The arrival of youthful undocumented migrants has been a source of cheap labour for years.
Without proper documentation, new migrants cannot demand better conditions like local workers do. “Blacks do the jobs that whites do not want to do,” says Mor, a Senegalese man who has worked loading sacks of bananas, one of the main exports of the Canary Islands.
The work was gruelling and the wages, a pittance. Cheikh, who has been in Spain for two years, once had a job picking broccoli. “I remember my hands freezing because it was very cold,” he says.
While the process of obtaining documents is a challenging, often years-long struggle, some like Mor eventually get work permits and secure jobs in the formal sector. Here the minimum wage is €1,000 ($1,000), roughly six times the amount they would earn in the informal sector in Dakar. Then, they start sending money back home. This is good for the national accounts of the Senegalese government. Senegalese workers abroad already send between $2.5-3-billion a year of their earnings back home, contributing nearly 10% of the country’s GDP.
It also means that Senegalese politicians can continue pursuing what economist Ndongo Samba Sylla describes as “jobless growth” to spruce up their economic statistics.
Macroeconomic indicators show Senegal has registered considerable economic growth for years. That growth could be supercharged by the export of gas and oil from deposits located in the northern part of the country. As Europe tries to wean itself off Russia’s gas following the war in Ukraine, German chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed interest in importing some of this gas. President Macky Sall reassured him Senegal was ready to work towards supplying the European market with liquefied natural gas (LNG), forecasting that the country’s LNG output would reach “10-million tonnes by 2030”.
That growth would have to happen over the cries of fisherfolk in Saint Louis who have already staged protests against the potential impact of oil extraction on their livelihoods.
But if those fisherfolk go to Europe to work on its farms for a pittance, there will be fewer protests against the LNG gas project.