Fish catches from Lake Victoria have plummeted by more than half over the past two decades, due to overfishing and pollution. Over the same period Kenya's population has doubled.
Vast stretches of water hyacinths, an invasive weed, along the shorelines, have also caused severe problems for the country's fishermen. The thick, interwoven carpet of the plants means that smaller boats can struggle to get out to clear water.
Kenya's Lake Victoria fishermen now bring in an estimated 140,000 tonnes of fish per year, little more than a quarter of the 500,000 required.
Chinese companies and their Kenyan partners seized the opportunity, and are now said to be exporting more than $17m (£13m) of fish to Kenya annually, more than double the amount three years ago.
It was an easy gap for the Chinese to fill, because the freshwater fish that they farm on a vast scale - tilapia - is from the same broad species that Kenyans mostly catch in Lake Victoria. So for Kenyan consumers the fish look and taste very similar.
The Chinese fish is just considerably cheaper, selling for as little as $1.70 per kg, compared with about $5 per kg for the local catch.
For Kenyan fisherman Frederike Otieno, it is a hopeless situation.
"While we spend many nights on the lake and lose a lot of money on fuel, we have to compete with this cheap Chinese farmed fish that floods the market," says the 36-year-old.
The biggest importer of Chinese fish in Kenya is a company called East African Sea Food. Its director, John Musafari, says that while the farmed Chinese tilapia is high quality, the low prices are possible because the fish is fed on rice bran, which is cheap and plentiful. This bran is the hard outer layer of each rice grain, which is removed in China before the rice is sold to consumers. Thanks to this Chinese tilapia, poor people can now eat nutritious protein-rich fish
For Edward Oremo, a Kenyan fisheries official, it will ultimately mean the end of commercial fishing on Lake Victoria.
"As long as Chinese imports continue... fishermen will be driven to despair, and Lake Victoria will be empty [of fishing boats] in less than 50 years."
2 comments:
That`s a switch: Chinese shipping food to Africa.
The last I heard (sorry I don't have any citation) the Chinese were buying huge swathes of African land to ship home to feed their increasing population.
This is the insanity of market capitalism.
I was just forced to buy alfalfa sprout seeds from Italy whose distributor (presumably) cut out a splendid Canadian local first-class producer.
African arable land is the cheapest on the world market to buy. It is not only the Chinese engaged in this land grab but the Gulf states, India and about everybody else.
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