Sahara Coastal - Exploitation

Harvest of marine resources in the Canary current region is an old activity that began off the Iberian Peninsula centuries ago, particularly in the case of the European sardine. The fishing activity spread thereafter to southern parts where Iberian and French fishermen have developed many fisheries in the 19th and 20th centuries, followed by other Western and Eastern European countries from the late 1950s (Pereira, 1999; Carrera and Porteiro, 2003). The post-war period was marked by an increase in exploitation of some marine resources and fishing grounds on the Saharan and Mauritanian Banks.
Trawling as a new technique of fishing was introduced in the traditional European fisheries only during the 1940s (Chauveau, 1989). The arrival of the distant water fleets in North West African waters at the end of 1950s led to intensification of the fishing effort on several fisheries in this region and thus a number of additional marine species were subjected to exploitation, not to mention over-exploitation. These fleets operating mainly in the central part of the region contributed to more than 50% of total tonnages of marine species removed from the Canary current ecosystem, represented mainly by small pelagic fish (FAO, 2001). This pattern changed drastically in the early 1990s following the transformation in Eastern European countries (FAO, 1997, 2001). After a progressive increase in the annual tonnages of fish and shellfish, achieved mainly by increased effort, average annual landings have been relatively stable since the mid-1970s.
Management measures implemented in Moroccan fisheries are mainly based on the Target-Resource-Oriented-Management (TROM) approach. These measures are essentially implemented to deal with the growing fishing capacity, interactions of spatial fleets and growth overexploitation issues. Nevertheless, elements of multispecies interactions and environmental forcing are considered to a certain extent in Moroccan management procedures (e.g. ban on catch and trade of threatened species, MPAs, bycatch thresholds, precautionary TACs).