Good afternoon. News that the Spanish fishing business Nueva Pescanova is planning to withdraw from Mozambique (as a website reports, and sources speaking to Zitamar News confirm) is another nail in the coffin of the country’s prawn fishing industry. In fact, it is probably the last. Nueva Pescanova is withdrawing partly for internal reasons: the company is restructuring, and the Mozambican market is not a priority. But conditions in Mozambique do not help.
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The fishing of prawns, known as shrimp in the United States, was once a big export business for Mozambique, earning over $100m a year in revenues. But the industry has declined in the last few decades, mainly because stocks of prawn have gone down. The government has failed to control overfishing, and prawn breeding areas have been damaged by pollution caused by sediment released from heavy mineral sands mining in Nampula and Zambézia, as well as by the destruction of mangrove forests on the coast. Prawns are only meant to be fished six months a year, to protect the prawns during their juvenile stage, but many coastal residents who fish for a living ignore this.
