Agriculture I - the fall of fishing
This blog post is going to be the first of three parts focussing on agriculture in the Lake Chad region. In this post I am going to focus on fishing and how it has changed in recent decades. In a 2007 BBC new article, Jacob Nyanganji of the University of Maiduguri suggested that ‘Africa is being cheated again by the industrialised West’ ( Murray 2007 ). Nyanganji suggests that Africa is bearing the brunt of aridification as a result of climate change, while it is the West which is producing the most significant quantities of greenhouse gases. The rate at which Lake Chad is shrinking has had significant consequences for local fishing communities and one former fishermen, described the local population as 'dying with the lake' ( Murray 2007 ). Past decades A large part of investigating how environmental change has affected fishing in the region is done through speaking to elderly villagers. Older generations can often remember when the waters of Lake Chad wer...