Patrick Whittle
FREEPORT, BAHAMAS (AP) – Tereha Davis, whose family has fished for conch from waters around the Bahamas for five generations, remembers when she could walk into the water from the beach and pick up the marine snails from the seabed.
But in recent years, Davis, 49, and conch fishers like her have had to go further and further from shore, sometimes as far as 48 kilometres, to find the molluscs that Bahamians eat fried, stewed, smoked and raw and are a pillar of the island nation’s economy and tourism industry.
Scientists, international conservationists and government officials have sounded the alarm that the conch population is fading due to overfishing, and a food central to Bahamians’ diet and identity could cease to be commercially viable in as little as six years.
“When I was a child, we never had to go that far to get conch,” said Davis, speaking at a Freeport market where she sold her catch. “Without conch, what are we supposed to do?” Conch’s potential demise reflects the threat overfishing poses around the world to traditional foods.
Such losses are among the starkest examples of how overfishing has changed people’s lives – how they work, what they eat, how they define themselves. The overfishing challenges faced by Bahamians are mirrored in places as disparate as Senegal, where overfishing has taken away white grouper, long the basis for the national dish of thieboudienne, and the Philippines, where it has depleted small fish such as sardines that are used in kinilaw, a raw dish similar to ceviche.
No longer a theoretical threat, overfishing has wiped out once abundant species and taken off the table forever beloved culturally important dishes. And it’s a worsening problem, the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has stated that more than a third of the world’s fish stocks are overfished, and the rate of unsustainable fishing is rising.
Governmental organisations and advocacy groups are working to stop illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing that has expedited the loss of species. They blame poaching, poor regulations and lack of enforcement of existing laws.
Regulators, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States (US), have said cutting down on illegal fishing is critical to prevent losing beloved food options.
The loss of such foods jeopardises the availability of protein and iron in people’s diets in poor countries and alters the course of culture in rich and poor nations, said a professor emeritus in the Indiana University Department of Anthropology Richard Wilk who has studied food cultures.
Nations that fail to control overfishing run the risk of repeating the mistakes of countries such as Japan, where the herring fishery collapsed in the middle of the 20th Century, costing jobs, reducing access to a traditional wedding food and leaving the country dependent on foreign supplies, he said.
But the toll is heaviest in developing nations and poorer communities. “The way that environmental changes and overfishing affect people and cuisine is different for subsistence fishers, who may end up going hungry, or local marketers, like the women who smoke fish on the beaches in West Africa,” Wilk said.
Few countries are as synonymous with a seafood as the Bahamas is with conch. Queen conch, the key food species, is a marine snail that reaches up to a foot in length and can live for 30 years.
The shells are conical with multiple protruding spines, and all parts except the shell are edible, with a flavour sometimes compared to both clams and salmon.
The shellfish appears prominently at the top of the national coat of arms and conch is widely recognised as the national dish.
Conch shells and symbols of the shellfish are everywhere: A giant statue of a conch shell greets tourists at Lynden Pindling International Airport in the capital city of Nassau. While conch can be pricey in the US and elsewhere, it’s so ubiquitous in the Bahamas that finding a filling meal of conch for less than USD10 is not difficult. That is less than the price of many meats on the island, and conch is also found for sale at most grocery stores for eating at home. In rural parts of the Bahamas, nearly two-fifths of the population eats conch weekly, according to one 2021 study.
The country of about 400,000 is home to 9,000 conch fishers – fully two per cent of the population, and the number appears to be holding steady even as conch declines, according to a study in the journal Fisheries Management and Ecology. The meat of the conch itself is worth millions per year at the docks, and it’s also a key driver of tourism to the islands, in addition to being an important export item to the US and many other countries where conch is a delicacy.
Divers typically harvest conch by hand, preferably in nearshore waters from a small boat and without gear any more sophisticated than a mask, snorkel and flippers. Sometimes working in fairly deep waters of 20 or 30 feet, divers can take home as many as 1,000 conchs in a single trip.
It’s typical to see discarded shells piled eight feet high on the shoreline, and some communities have special shell dumping sites where mountains of empty shells reach to the sky. Some of the shoreline shell piles are solid enough that they’re used as jetties or boat docks.
Sherica Smith, 44, owns Shabo’s, a popular conch stand on Grand Bahama Island. She too remembers a time when “you could walk out there and get conch”.
She motioned to the ocean behind her stand, where people fishing conch now must head to sea in boats to dive for the shellfish.
According to numerous government authorities and conservation agencies, queen conch has declined precipitously in some of the nation’s fishing grounds.
A 2011 survey of the Exuma Cays, a critical fishing area, found that the density of adult conch had declined by nearly 91 per cent on the islands’ shelf over a 20-year period, according to documents from the FAO of the UN.
The depletion of conch followed years of heavy harvesting, fishers who harvested about 1.7 million pounds of conch in the 1970s were up to more than 14 million pounds by 2006, the documents state.
The loss of conch intensified on several fishing grounds around the country starting in the 1990s.
Even Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, established in the 1950s as the first marine protected area in the Bahamas, is not immune to the loss of conch because fishing pressure that occurs outside of it limits the number of young conch moving into the park, the FAO found.
A 2022 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stated that queen conch “shows a negative trend over time and the decrease can largely be attributed to overfishing”.
The overfishing of conch is so dire that one estimate shows conch could disappear commercially in less than half a generation, said senior officer with the Bahamas Department of Marine Resources Lester Gittens.
A 2019 report from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago said the queen conch fishery could disappear as soon as 2029 without a reduction in harvesting.
