Sierra Leone's fishermen accuse Chinese trawlers of illegal fishing and sabotage

On Sherbo Island, seventy-five miles south of Freetown, the work begins before dawn. A dozen fishermen or more lean into the ropes, hauling a net thick with snapper, mackerel, barracuda, and rays onto the black sand. It is labor that has sustained these communities for generations. But the catch, year after year, has grown thinner.

Marie Pierre sorts through the day's take, picking sardines from among the jellyfish. She speaks matter-of-factly about what everyone here knows: large foreign vessels are moving into waters where they have no right to be. There is a seven-mile exclusion zone meant to keep industrial trawlers out, meant to protect the small-scale fishermen who depend on these waters for survival. The zone is being violated almost nightly, she says. Musa Gassimo, a fisherman with decades of experience, describes something darker still. He casts his nets in the evening and returns to shore. By morning, the lines have been cut—deliberately, he believes, by the trawlers anchored just beyond the legal boundary. Each severed net costs roughly $250 to replace, money most of these men do not have.

Thomas Turay, president of Sierra Leone's Fishermen's Union, sits in Tombo harbour near the capital and points toward the horizon where large vessels sit at anchor. His members' average catches have fallen by forty percent in recent years. He speaks with the weariness of someone who has watched a crisis deepen while institutions fail to respond. The trawlers come almost every night, he says. They know the exclusion zone exists. They come anyway. When he introduces visiting journalists to other fishermen, the stories accumulate: Abou Waisissé, seventy years old, witnessed an attack in which multiple local boats had their nets cut in a single night. Mohamedi Kamara, fifty-five, describes a collision with a large international vessel that damaged his craft. When these men lodge complaints with the Fisheries Ministry, nothing happens. Kamara says plainly: "Nobody listens."

The scale of the problem extends far beyond Sierra Leone. West Africa accounts for roughly forty percent of the world's unlicensed fishing catch, according to a 2024 global report. The economic toll is staggering—ten billion dollars in lost revenues annually across the region—and the human cost is measured in food security for millions of people. Steve Trent, CEO of the Environmental Justice Foundation, has tracked these vessels across multiple countries. The overwhelming majority, he says, are Chinese. There have been South Korean vessels, Taiwanese ships, European boats engaged in the same practices. But the pattern is unmistakable: Chinese dominance.

Sheku Sei, director of Sierra Leone's Ministry of Fisheries, offers a different narrative. The illegal fishing problem, he insists, has been substantially addressed. All international vessels now carry transponders that track their movements. Government inspectors conduct routine checks. Financial penalties for breaching the exclusion zone provide a strong deterrent. When pressed on the well-documented practice of vessels disabling transponders to avoid detection—a tactic used globally to evade trade sanctions—Sei denies it occurs in Sierra Leone's waters. He cannot, however, point to a single instance in the past decade where the penalty for violating the exclusion zone was actually imposed. Turay attributes the gap between policy and enforcement to corruption. Government authorities, he suggests, are afraid to act because those running illegal operations have money to distribute as bribes.

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Sierra Leone did not respond to requests for comment. The Chinese Foreign Ministry, responding to similar allegations in Latin American waters, issued a statement characterizing China as "a responsible fishing nation, strictly enforcing the regulation of its distant-water fishing activities." Trent views this as willful blindness. China, he argues, is not merely failing to control its fleet—it is actively enabling illegal fishing through subsidies and deliberate lack of oversight. The fish being extracted from West African waters are sold globally, he points out. Consumers in wealthy nations are unknowingly purchasing products taken illegally from poor countries, products harvested unsustainably and at tremendous cost to local communities. The solution requires better vessel tracking, international pressure on Beijing, and a shift in consumer awareness. Whether any of that will materialize remains uncertain.