The Spanish fishing company Nueva Pescanova intends to sell its Mozambican subsidiary, Grupo Pescamar, and its fleet of 26 fishing vessels. Fishing industry sources, cited by the Zitamar agency, confirmed that the Spanish company wants to withdraw from Mozambique. This could be a serious blow to the fishing and export of prawns, which used to be one of the country’s main exports.
At its height, the export of prawns was earning the country 100 million dollars a year in foreign exchange. But the main prawn fishing grounds have been severely overfished. Prawn stocks have declined, partly because the closed season for prawns has been widely ignored.
So fishermen take prawns from the ocean while they are still in their juvenile stage, thus pushing the species into decline. The Zitamar report also argues that prawn breeding areas have been damaged by pollution caused by the sediments from the mining of heavy mineral sands in Nampula and Zambezia provinces, and by the destruction of the coastal mangrove forests. The mangroves provide a nursery for many fish and shellfish species, but they have been cut down for timber and firewood all along the coast.
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One by one, multinational companies have been abandoning the prawn fishing industry, until Nueva Pescanova was the only one left. Industrial fishing companies still fish for deep water prawns (known as “gambas”) but they are considered to be of lower quality than the surface water prawns caught nearer the coast. Unless the Mozambican government acts vigorously to protect prawn stocks, the prawn fishing industry seems unlikely to recover.
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