Richster Nii Armah Amarfio, the Secretary of the Ghana Tuna Association, has cited excess capacity as the main cause of the fish stock’s rapid decline in Ghana.
In an interview, Mr. Amarfio claimed that there were far too many fishing operations taking place in Ghana’s marine areas, making it nearly impossible to replenish the depleted fish resource.
According to him, Ghana had exceeded the maximum sustainable output, which showed that the nation’s fish stock had been overexploited.
“From the last fisheries management plan after World Bank project, we are talking about 9000 canoes as the limit but we have close to 15,000. At the time we had over 100 trawlers, the proposition was 45 but we agreed to 75 so now we have about 75 trawlers,” Mr Amarfio revealed.
“This basically means we are losing our fish stock, so we have to find ways of reversing this to make sure we are sustainable,” he added.
The Secretary of the Ghana Tuna Association claimed that because Ghana has an open access fishing system and no working regulatory framework, the overfishing situation only appears to get worse.
As a result, he recommended that the government implement further interventions, such as a pension plan, in addition to the closed season policy to address the issue of overcapacity.
The Secretary of the Ghana Tuna Association said that a special pension plan for elderly fisherman would give them a respectable source of income in their later years, allowing them to retire earlier and removing a significant proportion of them from the industry permanently.
He also stated that there should be a deliberate educational policy for the youth in fishing communities that would absorb them into other vocations, leading to a decrease in the reliance of coastal communities on fishing activities.