The Fight to Slow the Global Fish Crash Has a Big Problem
As fish populations plummet, a huge swath of the seafood industry goes unmonitored, hampering conservation. One company is trying to fix that.
The idea for NEMO, a device that can allow monitoring of small fishing boats, began with a fishery in Senegal. Above, the day’s catch on a small boat in Dakar on Oct. 18.
Photographer: John Wessels/AFP/Getty ImagesBiendi Maganga-Moussavou had a problem.
As Gabon’s minister of fisheries, agriculture and food security, he helps oversee the African country’s marine protected areas, some of the most extensive in Africa. Covering 27% of Gabon’s Exclusive Economic Zone, these waters are supervised using monitoring technology that tracks larger vessels, which are required to report their catch. But many of Gabon’s fishers run smaller operations that don’t have such systems, or even automated identification.