Fishers at Magogoni fish market. Credit: Kizito Makoye/IPS
By Kizito Makoye
NICE, France, Jun 12 2025 – Just before dawn, the worn wooden dhows begin gliding toward the shore at Magogoni fish market in Tanzania’s port city of Dar es Salaam. Their tattered sails flutter against the orange sky. Exhausted fishers step out onto the muddy sand, hauling frayed nets and plastic crates, their sun-creased faces tight with fatigue.
The Magogoni scene — women wrapped in colourful khanga bargaining over a modest catch, children darting between upturned buckets, and the pungent smell of raw sewage pouring into the sea through a rusted pipe — doesn’t deter anyone.
It is a struggle for survival for thousands of small-scale fishers who rely on the Indian Ocean to put food on their families’ dinner tables.
Yet today, one certain thing emerges.
More than 7,000 kilometres away in the French Riviera, global leaders, marine scientists, and policymakers gathered this week for the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference. The conference saw the launch of the Review of the State of World Marine Fishery Resources by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). The report laid bare the crisis confronting the world’s oceans — and sounded a dire warning for fisher communities in Tanzania who rely on the sea to eke out a living.
According to the FAO, just 47.4 percent of fish stocks in the Eastern Central Atlantic are currently fished at sustainable levels. The rest are either overexploited or facing collapse, pushed to the brink by climate change, weak governance, and a lack of data.
“We now have the clearest picture ever of the state of marine fisheries,” FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu told delegates. “The next step is clear: governments must scale up what works and act with urgency.”
For fishers like Daudi Kileo (51), who has spent decades at sea, that urgency is overdue. “We don’t get enough catch these days, but we keep working hard,” he told IPS by phone all the way from Dar es Salaam; dragging a nearly empty net across the sand is disheartening, he said.
In Tanzania, most fishers operate informally. Their boats lack sensors or licences. Their harvests go unrecorded. There are no quotas, no conservation enforcement, and little training on sustainable practices. Each night, they sail into deep waters hoping to return with enough to make ends meet — increasingly, they don’t.
“Sometimes we come back with less than we need to feed our children,” Kileo says. “But we do not have a choice.”
While fishing communities in Tanzania are battling overfishing and declining catches, other parts of the world point to a different future. In Port Lympia, Nice’s harbour, the wafting air carries no pungent smell to disturb visiting dignitaries. Small boats bob idly; many seem to be ferrying tourists instead of chasing fish. It is a glimpse into what can be achieved when policies favour protection over exploitation and when economies evolve beyond extraction.
“There’s a future where the ocean can feed us sustainably,” said Professor Manuel Barange, Director of the FAO Fisheries Division. “But it requires deep, structural change — and fast.”
Leisure boats at Port Lympia, Nice, where the UNOC3 is being held. Credit: Cecilia Russell/IPS
Central to that change is the FAO’s Blue Transformation initiative, an ambitious strategy aimed at transforming aquatic food systems through sustainable practices, robust governance, and inclusion. The plan targets improved monitoring, ethical fishing practices, and expansion of responsible aquaculture while combating illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing — a major threat to fragile ecosystems and vulnerable communities.
However, turning that vision into reality in low-income countries like Tanzania remains a monumental challenge.
“We don’t have the tools or the support,” says Yahya Mgawe, a researcher at the Tanzania Fisheries Research Institute. “The fishers are many, our data is patchy, and enforcement is weak. We are falling behind,” he told IPS in Nice.
The consequences are dire. Tanzania’s fisheries sector employs more than 180,000 people, the vast majority in small-scale operations. Fish provide not only income but vital nutrition, especially in rural areas. Yet as climate change alters fish migration and breeding patterns, and as competition intensifies in overfished waters, traditional knowledge is no longer enough to sustain livelihoods.
“Everything is shifting,” says Nancy Iraba a marine ecologist at the University of Dar es Salaam. “Species that were once common are disappearing. Fish are getting smaller. And the time and effort fishers must invest is increasing, with diminishing returns.”
The FAO report highlights that in regions with better regulation and investment in science — such as the Northeast Pacific — over 90 percent of fish stocks are harvested sustainably. These gains, experts say, come from stringent quotas, real-time data collection, and cooperation across borders.
But in Africa and other parts of the Global South, the disparity is widening.
“The fishers of Tanzania are not the cause of ocean depletion,” says Iraba. “But they are among the first to pay the price.”
Recognising this injustice, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu used the conference platform to champion small-scale fishers as “guardians of biodiversity” and crucial actors in global food security. He urged countries to include them in decision-making processes and policy implementation.
“Fishers are not just producers,” Dongyu said. “They are nutrition providers and economic anchors in coastal societies. Transformation must be environmental, social, and economic — all at once.”
He also made a call to invest in youth participation, noting that as the global population nears 10 billion, young people must be empowered to innovate within the marine sector. “They must be leaders, not just observers,” he emphasised.
Yet progress remains slow. While sustainable fishery landings now represent 82.5 percent of global totals — a modest improvement — the share of overfished stocks globally still stands at 35.4 percent. And despite ambitious global targets to protect 30% of marine areas by 2030, only 2.7% of oceans are currently effectively protected.
The financial gap is just as wide. Experts estimate that up to USD 175 billion a year is needed to achieve sustainable fisheries transformation, but pledges remain far short of that figure.
As the conference concludes on Friday, FAO marked its 80th anniversary and 30 years of the Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries with a renewed push for innovation, including a new recognition programme for responsible aquaculture.
“Effective management is the best conservation,” Dongyu reminded delegates. “Our oceans, rivers, and lakes can help feed the world — but only if we use their resources responsibly, sustainably, and equitably.”
Back in Dar es Salaam, the boats of Magogoni are already being readied for another night. The sun rises higher, casting long shadows across the fish-streaked sand.
“We hear empty talk of big meetings and policies all the time,” says Kileo. “But nobody comes here to ask us how we survive. Nobody helps us when the fish disappear.”
His words hang in the salty air, a quiet reminder that unless the voices of small-scale fishers are included in the global vision for sustainable seas, the transformation may leave the most vulnerable behind.
IPS UN Bureau Report
Egyptian Pound Exchange Rate