Fish stocks in Africa’s Lake Kariba, which include tilapia, bream, catfish, and more, currently suffer from overfishing and increasing pressures from climate change.
To alleviate the pressing issue, Zambia and Zimbabwe need to harmonize their respective policies on managing the lake’s fishery and push for more aquaculture operations to ease the strain currently placed on wild stocks, according to Zimbabwe Director of Fisheries and Aquaculture Resources Production Milton Makumbe.
“We need to introduce aquaculture into our communities to lessen the pressure on our shared water resource,” Makumbe said.
Lake Kariba, which is the world's largest artificial lake and reservoir by volume, straddles the border between the two southern African nations, and as a trans-boundary resource, Makumbe called for Zambia and Zimbabwe to develop similar policy guidelines during a recent workshop held in Siavonga, Zambia, with the support of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Zambia and Zimbabwe have, at least on paper, a protocol concerning economic and technical cooperation that focuses on the management and development of the Lake Kariba fishery, but Makumbe highlighted that there are no concrete steps yet to enforce the protocol’s guidelines.
Besides promoting aquaculture, the suggested policy guidelines to which Makumbe referred include fishery regulations that boost efforts to address overfishing, persistent illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, and climate change, which comprise the biggest threats to the lake’s ecosystem.
Zimbabwe’s Parks and Wildlife Management Authority has, in the past, reported incidents of illegal cross-border fishing due to the lack of a “joint enforcement system between Zambia and Zimbabwe.”
In a recent report, the authority warned that the number of unlicensed inshore fishers operating in closed areas has been on the rise, as “anyone with money can access fishing boats on the pretext that their boat is for sport fishing.”
“The fish is sold to traders who access the illegal landing sites using motorized boats,” the report said.
According to the Zimbabwe Situation, pirates have even begun taking to the lake’s waters to steal fish, fishing equipment, and fuel, with the lack of regulation making the lake’s fishers an easy target.
Lake Kariba’s inshore fishery is the main outlet of fish production in the Zambezi Valley, which traverses both countries, with an annual estimated output of more than 2,000 metric tons of fish from both subsistence and commercial fishing.
According to The Guardian, the fishery’s output was as high as 30,000 MT around 1990.
