SAINT-LOUIS, Senegal
When the gas rig arrived off the coast of Saint-Louis, residents of this seaside Senegalese town found reason to hope. Fishing has long been the community’s lifeblood, but the industry was struggling with climate change and COVID-19. Officials promised the drilling would soon bring thousands of jobs and diversification of the economy.
Instead, residents say, the
rig has brought only a wave of problems, unemployment and more poverty. And
it’s forced some women to turn to prostitution to support their families, they
told The Associated Press in interviews.
To make way for the drilling
of some 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (425 billion cubic meters)
discovered off the coasts of Senegal and
neighboring Mauritania in West Africa in 2015, access to fertile fishing waters
was cut off, with the creation of an exclusion zone that prevents fisherman
from working in the area.
At first, the restricted areas
were small, but they expanded to 1.6 square kilometers (0.62 square miles),
roughly the size of 300 football fields, with construction of the platform that
looms about 6 miles (10 kilometers) offshore.
Soon the work was overtaking
the diattara, a word in the local Wolof language for the fertile fishing ground
that lies on the ocean floor beneath the platform.
With 90% of the town’s 250,000
people relying on fishing for income, the catch — and paychecks — were
shrinking. Boxes of fish turned into small buckets, then nothing at all.
Saint-Louis, Senegal’s historic center for fishing, has faced many troubles over the past decade. Sea erosion from climate change washed away homes, forcing moves.
Thousands of foreign
industrial trawlers, many of them illegal, snapped up vast amounts of fish, and
local men in small wooden boats couldn’t compete. The COVID-19 pandemic
shut down market sales of the tiny hauls they could manage.
The rig was the final straw
for Saint-Louis, pushing it to the brink of economic disaster, according to
locals, officials and advocates. The benefits promised from the initial
discovery of energy off the coast haven’t materialized.
Production for the liquified
natural gas deal — planned by a partnership among global gas and oil giants BP and
Kosmos Energy and Senegal and Mauritania’s state-owned oil companies — has yet
to begin.
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