The extent of water that three countries are shared is suffocated by toxic discharges, the introduction of a species of invasive Chinese fish and overfishing.
by Noé Hochet-bodin (nairobi, correspondence)
omnipresent, disgusting, scent of rotten fish hover over the city of Kisumu, in eastern Kenya. Between October and November, more than 360 million tilapias died in Lake Victoria. An ecological disaster trained by a known phenomenon: upwelling, deep, polluted and little charged in oxygen, is suddenly raised on the surface, asphyxiating hundreds of millions of fish, parked in floating cages of farm. Total cost of losses: around 10 million euros.
“The lake speaks to us, he tries to tell us something, warns Boniface Nyakach, an activist who directs the Kisumu Peace and Justice Center. The water is green, it gives off a smell, and now the fish die . This is a call for help. “According to him, and other activists who have long alerted to his” death to come “, Lake Victoria is dying of overexploitation.
Second largest expanse of freshwater in the world, and larger in Africa, it shares its banks between Kenya (6 %), Uganda (43 %) and Tanzania (51 %), where more Of 40 million people depend on him daily. And owes its economic miracle to the introduction of the Nile pole in its waters by the British settlers in the 1950s.
water hyacinth, “our worst enemy”
The development of the species first caused a commercial boom and then a slow loss of the ecosystem, as the Darwin’s nightmare has bluntly shown. Because if it made it possible to beat fishing records at first, the Nile pole has since decimated hundreds of endemic species (more than 500 cichlids). The sockets have halved in the past thirty years. Above all, the large rush to the lake leading to urbanization, deforestation and pollution, destroyed a unique biodiversity of its kind.
Polluted waters, mixture of discharges of industrial products, pesticides and large -scale fertilizers, intoxicate fish. Like the recent appearance of water hyacinth, an invasive plant from Latin America. “Our worst enemy,” said her the fisherman Godfrey Agong. It flourishes in a polluted environment and deprives the lake of oxygen, suffocating in passing the fish and cutting access to fishing areas for Godfrey and local fishermen. The invasion, since controlled, has penalized their activity for years. Water hyacinths are now transformed into biogas by a local company.
Kenya consumes 500,000 tonnes of fish per year but only produces 150,000 tonnes. The fishing crisis prompted the authorities to make an ubiquitous decision: importing Chinese fish to meet demand on the banks of Lake Victoria. Since 2015, the Tilapias caught in the China Sea arrive daily in Kisumu after a 9,000 km journey, by container carrier, then by road.
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