Over ten years ago while walking through the Bakau fish market in the small West African country of The Gambia, I encountered a group of young men listening to the local radio. The station was interviewing a compatriot their age who had attempted to reach the Canaries, a Spanish archipelago off West Africa, in a flimsy wooden fishing boat. Describing his experience, he explained how many of his fellow passengers went mad, committed suicide by throwing themselves into the ocean, or resorted to cannibalism. This young man failed in his attempt to reach his goal—another country, a secure income, a better life—and decided not to attempt the trip again.Whether his fellow countrymen believed his tale of woe was doubtful. Sitting amidst the dead and dying fish, I heard many more tales—tales of a different sort. One fish seller explained to me that the government was just paying the interviewee to tell lies, and if he had the chance and the money himself, he would try to sail away immediately because there was no money to be made at the fish market but plenty of money to be made in the Canaries. According to this fish salesman, “All these politicians tell us not to go because we will die and we should stay here and work hard and make lots of money. These people who say this are liars, just big fat liars with lots of money in their pockets and lots of money in other countries. We can’t make money here, and if we can’t make money here we will die and so will our families, so we might as well go out. Either way we could die, so what difference does it make if we go or stay except we have a better chance and our families have a better chance if we get on a pirogue and make it to Spain?’’Another man told me that if he were rich enough to own a pirogue, he “would sell it to a people-smuggler. The people-smugglers are the ones with money now. They make thousands of dollars in every trip. They take our money and they get us to Spain and then we make money and send it home. The only way to make money in a pirogue now is to catch people, not fish.”A laborer in one of the government departments fished on the weekends to get extra food and said, “We are just poor Gambians with boats made from trees and engines fixed with broken wires. You toubabs (whiteys) have the money and the power and we have nothing and you take the fish away and we go hungry.”At Tanji, a fish-smoking village on the Atlantic coast, the workers shared the belief that the fish catches have fallen sharply because “foreign fishermen with their big boats and fancy equipment are taking most of the fish away from The Gambia.” One young man said, “You think I want to be like these old men, working all day for nothing, sitting in the stinking hot sun and waiting for boats to come in with no fish and selling to people with no money? You think I want to watch the small numbers of fish I finally get rot and stink because the government gives us no money and no proper storage? No. I would rather take my chance and go away on a pirogue and try to get to Europe. Maybe I make it alive. Maybe I die. What difference does it make? I am just going to be poor if I stay here and be a fisherman. If I die going to the sea for trying to get to Europe I know that I have tried to go out and find a job in your country and send money back to my family. The only thing the ocean is good for now is for getting away.” Other young fishermen standing on the shore echoed his words. All agreed that the trip would be worth the potential death traps.Fishermen—both full-time and part-time—complained that the size of their total catch and the size of individual fish was declining. The women, responsible for most of the on-shore handling, processing, and marketing of fish, complained that the fishermen were not bringing in enough fish for them to make a profit. The young students, standing outside a market stall looking for a snack, complained that the cost of fish pies had gone sky high. A mother of three sitting in her village said she no longer made fishball stew for her family because she couldn’t afford the price of fish.While these tales of woe were collected over ten years ago, they are still reverberating up and down the eighty-kilometer coastline of this poor and densely packed country. And, yes, they are personal stories, but these stories should make the world stand up, listen, and act. Clearly, one of the major resources for understanding and rectifying these related woeful tales is the local community and their knowledge of their local ecological, economic, and social environment.Today, the fish stocks are still dwindling, life for both full-time and part-time workers in the fishing industry is getting harder, their main source of protein is getting even more expensive, and the economic and social fabric of the fishing communities is disintegrating even further.This is not a new phenomenon. In the early 1900s, when the pilchard stock collapsed in the Bay of Biscay, French and Spanish boats headed toward the west coast of Africa (Munshi 2020). And, as European and Asian human populations have grown and/or their fish stocks have decreased, more and better equipped ships have made their way toward the west coast of Africa.Nor is this just a small blip on the nutritional and economic Gambian map. Fishing by traditional methods has been vital to The Gambia for thousands of years, and today it is crucial to the economy and health of many of its 2.6 million people as one of its main sources of income and the main supplier of animal protein in the diets of most Gambians—50 percent of the Gambian population’s protein comes from fish (Urbina 2021).Through their work in West Africa, the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has found that illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing depletes fish stocks, destroys marine ecosystems, puts artisanal fishermen at an unfair disadvantage, and jeopardizes the livelihoods of some of the world’s poorest people. According to EJF, when it comes to the impact of IUU fishing, West Africa is often cited as being the hardest-hit region in the world (Environmental Justice Foundation 2014), with many fish populations at the point of possible collapse (Trent 2022).In addition to IUU fishing fleets, fishing pressure on locally consumed species such as sardinella and bonga, a silvery type of shad, is increasing. Foreign-owned fishmeal plants popping up along the coast are taking a “crucial source of protein from the plates of the poorest Gambians, while leaving large swaths of the community out of work” and creating environmental pollution in inland lagoons and coastal beaches, local unemployment, and food insecurity while damaging the tourist industry (Summers 2019). According to Greenpeace Africa and the Changing Markets Foundation (2021), “Every year, over half a million tons of fresh fish that could be feeding millions of people in West Africa are being diverted to produce fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO) in order to feed animals in industrial aquaculture and farming.” One fishmeal plant in The Gambia took in 7,500 tons of fish a year—mostly sardinella and bonga, mainstays of the local diet according to Ian Urbina (2021). The fishmeal goes mainly to Europe and China where it will be used to feed farmed salmon (Urbina 2021) and farmed trout (McVeigh 2020) for European and American consumption. In the meantime, the fish needed for local consumption in The Gambia are disappearing.A Gambian fisherman in a small, handcrafted, wooden pirogue with a small outboard motor and very little equipment cannot compete with industrial foreign fleets equipped with high-powered engines, top-notch nets, and radar. According to Dr. Dyhia Belhabib, principal investigator at Ecotrust Canada and executive director at Nautical Crime Investigation Services, “The artisanal sector is better in terms of both the ecosystem and the economic footprint. It is by far more selective. It catches less fish than the industrial sector while providing more jobs. Industrial fleets, on the other hand, catch enormous amounts of fish while taking food and opportunities away, since most of them fail to land their catch in the region or employ locals.” (Email to author, June 2022)Furthermore, according to Dr. Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood, a lecturer in sustainable development at the School of Geography and Sustainable Development, University of St. Andrews in Scotland, “Because of the demand in EU countries, their vessels are undermining local food security and provoking conflict with artisanal fishers because they are targeting fragile fish species such as the European anchovy, bigeye grunt, sardinellas, bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna and swordfish.” (Email to author, June 2022)Combine these problems with the fact that women play a very active role in the artisanal fisheries sector. Many of the local women make up approximately 80 percent of the fish processors and 50 percent of the small-scale fish traders (UNCTAD 2014). It is women who traditionally bought fish from the artisanal fishermen, smoked the fish, fed their families with the fish, or sold it fresh at the local market or to middlemen who took their smoked goods to inland markets. Today they can no longer compete with the fishmeal plants and the attractive global prices for fishmeal.Because of the devastating impact of changes to their livelihood, many of the fishermen are considering other oceanic avenues of employment—very dangerous watery avenues. Take away the fish and it becomes clear that few options remain for those in fishing communities but to move elsewhere—and move they do. Unfortunately, the move is sometimes across a dangerous sea in an ill-equipped, brightly colored, wooden pirogue with no GPS, little food or potable water, not enough petrol, very few, if any, life jackets, and the likelihood of a deadly voyage.The boat journey from West Africa to the Canaries is considered the most lethal sea route to Europe, with the highest mortality rate (Alarm Phone 2021). Because of the so-called “invisible shipwrecks”—boats and bodies that vanish without a trace (the Red Cross estimates that 5 to 8 percent of all boats vanish)—the exact numbers will never be known (UN News 2021). Estimates, however, are not low—and they are growing (UN News 2021). According to The Economist, in the first seven months of 2021, 7,531 migrants arrived in the Canaries. That is more than twice as many in the same period in 2020, while more than 1,000 are likely to have died attempting this route. The Spanish NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) estimates that 2,087 people (mainly from West Africa) died or disappeared while trying to reach the Canaries in the first six months of 2021 compared to 1,851 people in all of 2020 (Mellersh 2021). According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), in recent years, Gambians have emigrated at a higher rate per capita than any other nation in Africa (2018). And some data suggest that many emigrants on this route from West Africa to the Canaries are fisherfolk or from fishing communities (UNODC 2012; Lawal 2021).Just over ten years ago, I saw a pirogue leaving the fishing port of Tanji and heading off into the distance. At the time, I wondered whether its occupants were just out for a night’s fishing or off to the Canaries via the most lethal route to Europe. I will never know. What I do know is that for many years the Gambian fishermen who decide that the poverty and hopelessness they and their families face is just too much have been known to set out in a flimsy, unseaworthy vessel, often said to be operated by ruthless smuggling rings, across a hazardous sea to the Canaries.When I consider the comparisons between fish and fishermen heading for the Canaries, I am reminded of something a Tanji fish-smoker told me years ago: “The toubab countries care more for our shrimps and fish than they do for our people. Our food goes in the good boats to Europe and our people go in the bad boats to die.”This strip-mining of the ocean is aided by many consumers far from these piscine-depleted west African shores who do not know, or possibly don’t care, that their fish often comes courtesy of IUU fishing, the large-scale clearance of the sea, the death of artisanal fishing communities, and sometimes the death of the out of-work, emigrating fisherfolk.Aware of the plight of the ocean, its creatures, and the communities that lie along its shore, the United Nations declared that this would be the decade of the oceans and 2022 would be the year of artisanal fisheries and aquaculture. On World Oceans Day, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, stated, “We urgently need collective action to revitalize the ocean. That means finding a new balance in our relationship with the marine environment. It means working together with nature, not against it, and building inclusive and diverse partnerships across regions, sectors, and communities to collaborate creatively on ocean solutions.…Ensuring a healthy and productive ocean is our collective responsibility, which we can only fulfill by working together.” (UN News 2022)And so, as consumers, what can we do? Perhaps a small step in the right direction might be the next time you read about an influx of immigrants from West Africa and wonder why so many people are leaving their communities, their friends, and their families, taking ill-equipped pirogues over choppy seas, willing to come face to face with dehydration, despair, and a watery grave, you might want to consider what is on your own plate. If your meal consists of West African fish, or farmed fish fed on fish meal from West African coasts, you may be part of the present problem. You could, however, become part of the future solution, if you simply demand that wholesalers, retailers and restaurants stop buying and selling fishmeal and fish oil produced using fish fit for human consumption from the West African region. Furthermore, you could demand that wholesalers, retailers, and your government release full transparency along the entire piscine food chain, from catching vessel to your plate, so that you do not purchase seafood sourced from criminal activities at sea.Many Gambians, known and unknown, kindly shared their experiences with me. A number of very helpful anonymous fisherfolk provided some much-needed translations. Miko Alazas, Dyhia Belhabib, Anita Le Roy, Catherine McEver, Sophie Nodzenski, and Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood provided valuable comments. Parts of this essay were first published in the Ecologist in October 2010 (https://theecologist.org/2010/oct/19/how-pirate-fishing-fuels-human-exodus-africa-europe).