Senegalese fisherman Papa Dieye was struggling to survive on earnings of 20,000 CFA francs ($33) a month. “There are no fish left in the ocean,” he laments.
Years of overfishing by industrial vessels from Europe, China and Russia had wiped out Senegalese fishermen’s livelihoods — pushing them to desperate measures.
“We want to work to build houses for our mothers, little brothers and sisters,” he explains.
Big business across the globe caused this. It’s not like these people leave their homes because dying in the ocean is such a good thing to look forward to.
It’s sadly not widely known, but the infamous Somalian pirates also were just fishermen whose claims were illegally overfished by big international fishing vessels. They took matters into their own hands since their state failed and they tried to police their own waters, which got them labelled as pirates. After the fish dried out, and they were pirates either way, that’s how their way of life started.
And now these people face extinction through climate change.