Stakeholders Call For Protection Of Inland Waters, Coastal Areas

With Nigeria importing over 60 per cent of the fish, it is consuming, stakeholders have called for the protection and conservation of fishes in the inland waters and coastal environment to avert the trend.

A professor of Biomonitoring and Restoration Ecology, Department of Fisheries, University of Port-Harcourt, Prof. Nenibarini Zabbey, at a media roundtable on strengthening Ocean and Maritime policies, organised by Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), in Lagos, said, with the nature of the Niger Delta, the expansive inland water bodies in Nigeria and the coastline of 853 kilometres, which borders the Atlantic Ocean in the gulf of Guinea, Nigeria is not supposed to import fish.

The reason for the low production of fish in Nigeria is because the country’s inland and coastal waters are heavily degraded, Zabbey told LEADERSHIP, and they cannot deploy their ecosystem services effectively.

Explaining further, the professor said: “every square kilometres of Mangroves, a group of trees and shrubs that live in the coastal intertidal zone, support fish production of 90 to 280 tons annually. When we allow our mangroves to degrade, it means we are losing large quantity of fish that such mangroves would have supported on an annual basis.

“No matter the amount of money the Nigerian government is investing in aquaculture, which is meant to complement coastal fisheries, the country cannot achieve fish self sufficiency. We will continue to import fish. but if we protect and conserve the fishes in inland waters and coastal environment and concurrently invest in aquaculture, then both systems will complement each other and there will be dramatic increase in fish production.”

On the recent surge in flood cases in Nigeria, the Professor said, sand mining and reclaiming of wetland areas are major contributors to flooding in Nigeria.

To protect the water system, Zabbey called for multi-stakeholders approach.

In the same vein, media communications officer, HOMEF, Kome Odhomor, said the programme was organised to strengthen the ocean and maritime policies, while calling on government to enforce policies formulated to protect the ocean.

“Policies formulated to tackle plastic pollution, oil pollution, hazardous emissions from industries, dredging and sand mining, land reclamation and conversion and inefficient sewage disposal must be strictly enforced to protect the ocean,” Odhomor averred.