Latest news with #Sierra Leone
Al Jazeera
2 days ago
- General
- Al Jazeera
The night divers seeking sea cucumbers and profits off West Africa's coast
In search of delicacies and profits off West Africa's coast. Omolade Jones with a sea cucumber [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Omolade Jones with a sea cucumber [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Banana Islands, Sierra Leone - As the sun dips below the horizon, Emmanuel Pratt tugs a worn cord and the outboard engine sputters to life. His wooden canoe, painted in white and faded blue, cuts through the darkening waters. Fruit bats screech overhead. Pratt, 35, is a seasoned sea cucumber diver from the Banana Islands - an archipelago home to about 500 people in Sierra Leone. For 15 years, he has made a living scouring the ocean floor for these creatures that resemble warty, oversized sea slugs. They hide in the silt by day and emerge at night to inch across the ocean floor, gobbling up decomposing matter. Also on the canoe, 25-year-old Omolade Jones - sweating in a half-zipped-up wetsuit - perches on the edge of the boat and gazes out at the dark water. After 10 minutes, the younger diver gestures at Pratt to cut the engine and readies himself to dive. Jones blows on his mask, grabs an underwater torch and wraps a breathing hose around his waist. The seabed surrounding the small, jungle-coated archipelago used to teem with sea cucumbers. Nowadays, they are scarce and scattered. Freediving is no longer an option. Pratt and Jones have to dive deeper, for longer, to find their catch. They have turned to 'hookah diving' - a makeshift system where air is pumped from a diesel-powered generator on the boat down through a plastic hose. It is a risky and fragile lifeline. The engines are often old and the air is easily contaminated by diesel fumes. And experts say it is much more dangerous than scuba or free diving. As the diesel engine that powers his air supply rattles in the boat, Jones quietly slips over the edge into the black water. The yellow hose trails behind him as he swims away from the canoe. Minutes later, his torch lights up a column of water above the seabed. Pratt sits in the canoe, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes fixed on the spot where Jones's light is. 'The cucumbers are running out,' he says glumly. While they used to haul in dozens of buckets of sea cucumbers a night, now they struggle to find a handful. Pratt says the divers rarely make more than $40 on a dive - barely enough to cover the costs of fuel or to hire some of the diving equipment. Not long after Jones exits the boat, he flashes his torch to signal that he is ready to swim back in. When he reaches the canoe, he hoists himself up on the side with his forearms. In one hand, he holds the torch, in the other, a small, brown sea cucumber. Pratt takes his turn and disappears into the dark water. He surfaces a while later with a sea cucumber. But the divers are unimpressed. After a couple of hours at sea, they head back to the mooring with a meagre catch of just three specimens. Overhead, the almost-full moon casts a white sheen over the water and dimly illuminates the way home. Emmanuel Pratt walks down to the harbour before a dive [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Emmanuel Pratt walks down to the harbour before a dive [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] While they may not be much to look at, sea cucumbers are prized as a delicacy in China and other parts of Asia. They are served up at banquets or on festive occasions. A single kilogram (2.2lb) of the dried isostichopus maculatus maculatus variety found in Sierra Leone sells for up to $1,237 in marketplaces in Hong Kong, according to Steven Purcell, a professor in marine science at Southern Cross University in Australia. In recent years, demand for sea cucumbers has also been buoyed by Asia's wellness industry. Extracts of the animal are now a common ingredient in health supplements and face creams, which are sold across China, Japan and South Korea. Rich in zinc and collagen, sea cucumbers are purported to boost heart health, cure urinary tract infections and reduce the appearance of wrinkles. Chinese folklore also holds that they are an aphrodisiac, due to their phallic shape and the way they stiffen and expel their entrails when threatened. But Asia's appetite for the animals is pushing global stocks to the brink and quietly damaging the marine ecosystem. Sea cucumbers play a vital role in recycling decomposing matter, turning it into nutrient-rich sediment that helps aerate the seabed. This improves the health of coral reefs and seagrass beds. 'Since the 1980s, sea cucumbers have been plundered in seas across the world, sought after by Asian traders,' says Purcell. 'We are seeing clear signs of severe overfishing from underwater surveys of the animals.' The Banana Islands are no exception. Ever since two Chinese traders showed up in 2010 to source and export sea cucumbers, locals say overfishing has decimated local stocks. If only divers had been trained to fish them sustainably - diving seasonally and collecting just the mature ones - then stocks might still be healthy, says Stephen Akester, an adviser on West African fisheries for the World Bank. If this were the case, then divers like Pratt might have been able to rely on sea cucumbers to provide them with a steady income stream over several decades. As it stands, nowadays, he can barely find enough to make a living. Pratt holds two boiled sea cucumbers [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Pratt holds two boiled sea cucumbers [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Islanders began searching for sea cucumbers 15 years ago. This was when two traders - Chinese men known to islanders as Mr Cham and Mr Lee - turned up on Banana Islands. At that point, sea cucumber stocks across Asia were already badly depleted and businesspeople were searching further afield for the precious marine commodity. Cham and Lee introduced themselves to the then-island chief, Georgiana Campbell, showed her a photograph of a sea cucumber, and asked if she had ever seen one. Campbell, now retired, remembers the moment vividly. 'We used to see them under the rocks all the time,' she says, lounging on her porch with her grandson. 'But we didn't know they were worth anything.' She remembers calling over some fishermen to take a look at the picture. They confirmed that they often caught the animals in their nets and would just toss them back to sea. 'They were polite, because they wanted something,' Campbell says, referring to Cham and Lee. 'They came with all kinds of promises.' A few days later, the men apparently returned with a third associate, an American called "Mr Coleston", to help finalise the deal. In return for letting them harvest the sea cucumbers, the traders promised residents that they would bring solar energy to the island and dig two new water wells. They would also add an extension to the local school and build a community centre, they said. But none of the promises were kept. 'All they ever gave us were 10 bags of cement,' Campbell says - intended, she adds, for the community centre that never got built. A diver fixes his nets [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] A diver fixes his nets [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Today, Banana Islands has no running water nor a connection to the electricity grid. A few households have installed solar panels, but most people cannot afford them and rely on flickering, battery-powered torches after dark. Like 60 percent of those living in rural Sierra Leone, the majority of Banana Islands residents live on less than $2 a day. 'The Chinese men used us, all of us,' Pratt grumbles. Cham and Lee had also promised to train local fishermen like him to dive for sea cucumbers, he says. In return for gathering the animals and delivering them to the mainland, they promised fair wages and regular medical check-ups. But 15 years on, Pratt suffers from persistent chills and body aches he suspects are linked to the work he does. He says he only received one medical check-up. With no savings, he can barely afford to see a doctor on the mainland. The divers also say they were ripped off by the foreign businessmen, who paid them just $0.90 per kg (2.2lb) of raw sea cucumbers. But even with meagre wages, they could still earn a living at the start, as they hauled in such a vast quantity of sea cucumbers. They sometimes collected 60kg (130lb) a night while freediving. This method was also cheaper as it required less gear. Yet as the animals grew scarce, it became much harder to make ends meet. It was only several years later, once Cham and Lee had returned to China, that other traders turned up and offered better prices. Men from China, as well as Lebanon and Sierra Leone, came to buy sea cucumbers. One Chinese trader taught the divers to process their catch, increasing their profits. Jones and Pratt now sell 1kg (2.2lb) of dried, processed sea cucumbers for about $40. They usually take their catch to a handful of traders in Tombo, a nearby fishing village. They sometimes deliver the sea cucumbers to a Chinese casino in Freetown, where they are either exported or served up in the adjoining restaurant. While the traders got rich, the divers did not. 'Cham was the main man who extracted a huge quantity of sea cucumbers from Sierra Leone,' says Woody Koroma, public relations officer for the country's Artisanal Fisherman Union. 'He became very rich.' Houses in Dublin village, Banana Islands [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Houses in Dublin village, Banana Islands [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] The Banana Islands - which reportedly got their name because the Portuguese who landed there in 1462 thought they resembled a bunch of bananas - consist of two small inhabited islets connected by a stone causeway and one uninhabited island. They were once the site of a slave prison, held at different points throughout the 18th century by the British and Portuguese. Traces of their brutal past linger. A collection of moss-covered stones marks the site of a former slave fort, once capable of holding up to 2,000 people. Nearby, two rusted cannons bearing the British crown overlook one of the island's largest coves. Dublin is the largest of the islets. In the main village, a cluster of weathered clapboard houses sits in a clearing, surrounded by banana trees and scraggly bushes. The morning after the dive, an elderly man dozes in a green string hammock, hung between two trees, while chickens peck at the ground around him. A short distance away on the edge of the village is Jones's house - a tin-roofed bungalow - where the divers are at work, boiling and salting their catch from the night before. They move methodically through their routine: Pratt stands by an open stove, a tub of salt in one hand, while a saucepan of water boils beside him; Jones fans the flames with pieces of cardboard. In a plastic bucket, nearby, three sea cucumbers await processing. After boiling and salting them, the divers leave the sea cucumbers to dry in the sun. Processing the catch not only preserves it and makes it easier to export, but also drives up Pratt and Jones's profit margins - they can now deliver the final product to the traders. 'Ten years ago, we didn't know the real price of the sea cucumber,' Pratt says, 'We never knew their value.' Jones boils sea cucumbers [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Jones boils sea cucumbers [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Banana Islands divers are not the only ones feeling the effects of the sea cucumber decline - the nearby reef lies lifeless and grey. 'The sea cucumber is the dustman of the sea,' says Akester. 'They eat all the algae on the reef. When a coral reef runs out of sea cucumber, it dies. That's what's happened off Banana Islands.' Sadly, the damage is not limited to local reefs. Across Sierra Leone's waters, Akester says, the marine environment is under increasing pressure. Industrial trawlers from South Korea, China, and, more recently, Turkiye and Egypt, have fished along the continental shelf where fish spawn. Certain species like the yellow croaker, once plentiful, are starting to disappear. Turkish trawlers are targeting small pelagic fish, including mackerel and sardines, which the local fisheries depend on. 'There are fewer fish than before,' Suleiman Seaport, a 40-year-old fisherman, confirms. 'We don't eat other meat - fish is what our families survive on.' Up to 80 percent of Sierra Leoneans do not have enough food, according to the UNWFP. For the majority of the population, fish is the most affordable, and often the only, source of protein. Banana Islands [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Banana Islands [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] When Pratt isn't diving for sea cucumbers, he relies on spearfishing. But, these days, even that catch is small, partly as a result of overfishing trawlers. His house in Dublin village was built eight years ago, with cash from his early sea cucumber earnings. Back then, stocks were still abundant. Now, the brick bungalow is starting to crumble. The roof, which has been patched up with blue tarpaulins, is leaking badly, and the leather sofas have been ruined by rainwater. The walls, once covered in a bright lick of blue paint, are now faded and smudged. As the rainy season approaches, Pratt worries that the roof will not hold. 'I want to repair my place, but I don't have the money,' he says, exhaling cigarette smoke as he perches on the edge of a battered sofa. Later on, he adds: 'They promised us many things, but they are liars,' referring to the foreign businessmen who broke their word to the community. For generations, Sierra Leone has been a site foreigners came to for resources - from diamonds, purchased by big companies which helped fund rebel groups during the civil war, to precious rosewood felled by mainly Chinese traders, and iron ore mined by UK companies. Further back, the country was a huge hub for British and Portuguese slave traders. For locals, the short-lived sea cucumber boom on Banana Islands echoes a wider trend in Sierra Leone's history: As trawlers and opportunistic traders plunder the seas, the country's natural wealth once again goes to enrich outsiders. Meanwhile, locals are left with less to eat and fewer ways to earn a living. Meanwhile, divers are trying to build on new dreams. 'I am becoming a musician,' Jones says, before playing a sample of his latest recording on his phone. His voice is layered over a catchy, Afrobeats-style rhythm. 'I have talent, I want to do that instead.' Jones in the water diving for sea cucumbers [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera] Jones in the water diving for sea cucumbers [Olivia Acland/Al Jazeera]
Zawya
16-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Qatar's Minister Of Labor Pays Courtesy Visit To Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio, Reaffirms Bilateral Cooperation
The Minister of Labor of the State of Qatar, Dr. Ali Bin Sammikh Marri, paid a courtesy call on His Excellency President Dr. Julius Maada Bio at State House in Freetown, reaffirming his country's commitment to deepening bilateral cooperation with Sierra Leone, particularly in the areas of labor and employment. Introducing the visiting delegation, Sierra Leone's Minister of Labor and Employment, Mr. Mohamed Rahman Swaray, informed the President that the Qatari Minister was on an official visit to explore ways to expand collaboration between the two nations' labor sectors. 'Your Excellency, I am pleased to introduce my counterpart, the Minister of Labor from Qatar, who is here to engage with us on strategic collaboration and deepen the ties between our two ministries,' Minister Swaray stated. In his remarks, Dr. Ali Bin Sammikh Marri thanked President Bio for the warm welcome and hospitality extended to him and his delegation. He recounted his early academic exposure to Sierra Leone more than 30 years ago, noting with delight that he had finally visited the country he once studied. 'It is a pleasure to be in Sierra Leone,' he said. 'Over 30 years ago, as a student, I was asked to write about Sierra Leone. Today, I am here in person, as Qatar's Minister of Labor, to explore collaboration, especially in labor market policies. With Your Excellency now serving as Chairman of ECOWAS, we see an opportunity to align with your leadership in regional labor development and cooperation.' Minister Marri also conveyed a message of congratulations on behalf of the Emir of Qatar, His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, to President Bio on his recent election as Chairman of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Government. 'I bring you fraternal greetings and congratulations from your brother, the Emir of Qatar, on your recent appointment. We appreciate your hospitality and look forward to strengthening our bilateral ties,' he concluded. In his response, President Bio warmly welcomed the Qatari Labor Minister and expressed appreciation for the visit and message from the Emir of Qatar. He noted that it was particularly meaningful that Dr. Marri, after writing about Sierra Leone three decades ago, was now visiting the country as a high-level representative of Qatar. 'Thank you very much for visiting. On behalf of the Government and people of Sierra Leone, we welcome you,' President Bio said. 'We have had a growing relationship with Qatar and look forward to expanding cooperation, especially in agriculture, education, and the digital economy, areas where we are investing heavily and seeing meaningful progress.' President Bio also welcomed the opportunity to explore broader labor collaboration across the ECOWAS region during his tenure as Chairman and emphasized the importance of leveraging international partnerships to advance a common African interest. 'It is an exciting moment to lead ECOWAS, and I see it as an opportunity to further engage the international community on shared priorities for West Africa,' he concluded. Distributed by APO Group on behalf of State House Sierra Leone.
Zawya
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Zawya
Civil Society Leaders Applaud Sierra Leone's President Julius Maada Bio's Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Chairmanship, Present Honorary Plaque
A cross-section of members of the West Africa Civil Society Network, Sierra Leone Chapter, has paid a courtesy call on His Excellency President Dr. Julius Maada Bio to extend a message of goodwill and offer their congratulations on his recent election as Chairman of the Authority of ECOWAS Heads of State and Government. Speaking on behalf of the delegation, the Thematic Lead for Education in the Sierra Leone Chapter, Mr. Alphonso Manley, conveyed the network's admiration and support for President Bio's leadership. 'Your Excellency, we are here today to congratulate you on your election as Chairman of ECOWAS. We want to assure you of our full commitment and readiness to work side by side with you during your tenure in achieving your objectives,' he stated. Presenting a plaque in honour of the President's dedication and commitment to elevating Sierra Leone's global standing, the Chairman of the Sierra Leone Chapter, Mr. William Sao Lamin, expressed appreciation on behalf of civil society. 'Today, on behalf of the Civil Society Network, we present this plaque as a symbol of your dedication and commitment to service. You have positioned Sierra Leone on the global map, and we are proud of your leadership,' he remarked. In his response, President Bio thanked the delegation for their kind gesture and noted the significance of collective achievement. 'I wish to express my profound gratitude for this congratulatory message. This is a collective celebration of what we can accomplish when we build synergy and work together as nations. It has always been my promise to raise Sierra Leone to greater heights, that's why today we lead ECOWAS and have a membership of the United Nations Security Council,' the President stated. He emphasized that such milestones are the result of shared national vision and belief, adding: 'This is a fulfilled promise to my country.' President Bio also used the occasion to encourage civil society organizations to serve as goodwill ambassadors for Sierra Leone. 'We should all be proud as a nation and promote the positive image of Sierra Leone. There is so much happening that should give us hope. As long as we continue to work together as partners in development, we will move this country forward. Your congratulations today are for all of us. Wherever I go, I will represent you and continue to inspire you and many others,' he concluded. Distributed by APO Group on behalf of State House Sierra Leone.
