A thriving trade in fish maw — made from the swim bladders of fish — could lead to the extinction of the Nile perch in east Africa’s Lake Victoria.
Demand for fish maw has spawned such a lucrative business enterprise in the region that it is raising concerns of overfishing.
The high profits involved mean that traders keep a low profile and are secretive about their haul’s eventual destination, said the women who gut the perch to extract the precious maw.
“We don’t know where they take it. They come to collect it and we sell it to them,” said Francisca Odhiambo, a mother of five, who sells fish at Dunga beach on the shores of Lake Victoria.
Fish maw has various uses, including the manufacture of surgical sutures, but it is also a delicacy in China, where it is served in soups or stews in addition to being used as a source of collagen.
It is also used to make water-resistant glue and in the production of isinglass, a refining agent involved in the manufacture of beer and wine.
Ironically, Nile perch is an invasive species. It was introduced to Lake Victoria in 1950 and has been blamed for the disappearance of the native fish and interfering with the lake’s ecosystem, but it is now an important part of the local economy.
“The fisher folk came to realize that the fish maw trade is a real business fetching lots of money in China and Hong Kong, and it’s not just a by-product,” Lake Victoria Beach Management Unit regional chairman Tom Guda said.
In the years between 2000 and 2005, Chinese traders came to Uganda looking to buy maw directly from fishers. The price of Nile perch shot up from US$2 a kilogram to between US$3 and US$4, Guda said.
“That has continued to date so that the Nile perch prices have stabilised because of the fish maw,” he said.
According to a report commissioned by the German development agency GIZ in collaboration with the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization in August last year, the Chinese agents supplying maw had better opportunities for business growth compared with others in Uganda.
For example, Chinese traders provided working capital to agents supplying maw, a facility that was unavailable to local fish sellers.
There is still little knowledge of this trade in the region and this in itself contributes to unsustainable fishing. For example, no guidelines or policy exist to regulate the fish swim bladder trade in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.
This means data on the amount of swim fish bladder being exported to China is hard to come by. The same goes for information about the population of Nile perch caught solely for the purpose of bladder harvesting.
According to a preliminary study by the Kenyan Marine and Fisheries Research Institute conducted in March last year, the bladder comprises an average of 2 percent of processed Nile perch by-product. It is estimated that up to 290 tonnes of the organ is exported from Kenya, but this figure is only a conservative estimate, because “the value chain of fish bladder is poorly understood beyond the lake region,” said Chrispine Nyamweya, the institute’s assistant director of limnology.
The institute said that the price in Kenya ranges between 4,000 Kenyan shillings (US$39.46) for maw weighing between 100g and 200g, and 16,000 Kenyan shillings for a weight of between 601g and 999g.
On the international market, maw fetches between US$450 and US$1,000 per kilogram depending on the market dynamics and quality of product.
Overall, fish stocks have been declining in the lake, due to a number of factors, such as pollution, overfishing and the use of illegal fishing equipment.
The water hyacinth weed is affecting the perch’s survival chances as well.
“Being a sight predator, clear waters are critical to the survival of the Nile perch,” Guda said.
Since the perch is an apex predator, it requires lots of oxygen — but widespread weed is preventing the fish from getting enough of it.
What this means, Guda said, is that fishers are compelled to go deeper into the lake, where there are no water hyacinth, to find the fish, and it is not such an easy task.
It takes five hours using a twin-engine speedboat to travel from Mbita (a landing site) to Remba, where the fish are located. Ordinary boats take eight hours.
Venturing deeper into the lake has its own dangers, Guda said.
This is where the Kenyan fishers and their Ugandan counterparts come into contact. Only one outcome is inevitable when this happens: conflict over fishing rights.
Efforts are in progress to formalize the trade, and introduce taxes, levies and inspection fees.
“Plans are under way to develop guidelines to ensure that the trade is regulated,” said Robert Kyanda, a marine scientist in Uganda and an official at the Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization secretariat.
Regulation might be the only answer to ensure sustainable harvesting of the fish.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past