THE waters off West Africa were once among the richest fishing grounds in the world. But fish stocks there have crashed by 80 per cent and the area is now as depleted as the North Atlantic. What’s more, just a day before researchers raised the alarm at a meeting in Brussels, European Union fishery officials signed new deals allowing them to take more fish than before off the coast of Angola. Similar deals have also been recently struck with Senegal and Mauritania.
“Fisheries in West Africa will go the way of the Grand Banks if something doesn’t change,” says Daniel Pauly of the University of British…
