DESPITE having long coastlines on the Mediterranean and the Red seas, as well as many natural and man-made lakes and the River Nile, Egypt is not self-sufficient in fish. Indeed, Egypt imports 300,000 tonnes of fish annually, according to statistics from the Fish Wealth Authority (FWA), which is affiliated to the Ministry of Agriculture. In 1998, Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, produced 406,000 tonnes of fish; this fell to 372,000 tonnes in 2007. In 1999, Egypt netted 89,000 tonnes of fish from the Mediterranean; by 2004, this had fallen to 47,000 tonnes. The Red Sea yielded 82,000 tonnes of fish to Egypt in 1999, decreasing to 46,000 tonnes in 2007. In the meantime, the fisheries have increased production from an estimated 139,000 tonnes in 1998 to 635,000 tonnes in 2007. Magd el-Bawwab, who used to work for the FWA told Al-Wafd opposition newspaper that one of the reasons for falling fish yields in Egypt was industrial and agricultural pollution. “All the drainage canals in Egypt flow into lakes and some of the water ends up in the Nile,” he explained. Another problem is that Egypt's lakes are shrinking. The surface of Lake Al- Manzalla in the Delta has declined dramatically from 750,000 feddans to only 130,000 feddans, while Lake Al-Burollos in Kafr el-Sheikh Governorate has also shrunk. According to el-Bawwab, about 50 per cent of fishermen don't have licences. This means that the lakes are over-fished, while some of them catch small fry, using nets that are too fine and don't meet the recognised technical specifications. “Meanwhile, too many fishermen have been granted nets to fish in the Mediterranean and Red seas. Another problem is that breeding fish is very expensive, because, for one thing, the food they eat has become costly,” he explained. Sayyed Sarahan, a former adviser to the Minister of Health, agrees that one of the biggest problems is pollution. “To overcome the problem of pollution, industrial and sewerage water should be recycled before it can enter the lakes, while the lakes need to be refreshed with seawater from time to time,” he says. “The sea also gets polluted by petroleum products which form a layer on the surface of the water, denying the fish the oxygen they need.”
