Chinese Demand for ‘Maw’ Behind Decimated Lake Victoria Fish Stocks

ADF STAFF

Sun glinted off the waters of Lake Victoria in Kisumu, Kenya’s third-largest city.

Victor Ndonga was among the throngs of fishermen who prepared their artisanal canoes for a day on the water. Speaking to The Associated Press, Ndonga said he was confident of catching some tilapia, but he was really hoping to get a haul of Nile perch, the swim bladders — or maw — of which are highly valuable. The swim bladder is an internal gas-filled organ that contributes to the ability of some types of fish to control their buoyancy.

“The fish maw is far more valuable than the flesh,” Ndonga said.

The Nile perch, a strong, fast-swimming predator that can grow to the size of a man, was introduced to Lake Victoria in the 1950s. Due to illegal fishing and overfishing to meet Chinese demand for maw, their stocks in Lake Victoria are severely depleted.

In China, maw is considered a delicacy and is used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) products with dubious medical claims of protecting the kidneys, boosting stamina and treating lung issues and anemia. The TCM-driven demand for maw is contributing to food and economic insecurity for Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Ugandan communities that depend on Lake Victoria’s fish stocks.

Gladys Okumu is one of Kisumu’s many fish traders who removes fish maw from Nile perch and sells it to brokers, who then pass it on to Chinese agents.

“In the past, fish were abundant, unlike now, when a whole day’s catch might yield only five Nile perch,” Okumu told the AP. “Nowadays, the fish maw is considered as valuable as gold.”

The involvement of middlemen in the selling process has caused a severe inflation in maw prices. On average, fish maws can command a retail value of between $127 and $287 per kilogram, according to a 2020 report in Frontiers in Environmental Science, “Lake Victoria’s Bounty: A Case for Riparian Countries’ Blue Economic Investment.”

Chinese demand for maw has driven harmful harvesting methods targeting breeding and juvenile stocks, leaving fewer Nile perch to reproduce. There was a veritable Nile perch boom in the 1980s and 1990s, when fishermen from across the continent traveled to Lake Victoria seeking pay dirt. They sold their catch to processing factories around the lakeshore, in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and the factories exported it to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

In the mid-1990s, fishermen in Tanzania’s portion of Lake Victoria, alone, caught 200,000 tons of Nile perch annually. It was so important to the livelihoods of locals that it came to be known as “the savior fish.”

A fish trader at a market in Mwanza, Tanzania, told African Arguments in 2022 that the price for Nile perch had tripled over the previous five years. “Supply is down, but demand is still high,” the trader said.

Chrispine Nyamweya, a research scientist at the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, told the AP that the fish maw trade is not fully regulated, making it difficult to monitor exports.

“People target the big one because of the big fish maw they get from them and by doing that you truncate the population such that you only have the small ones dominating in the lake and that affects the replenishment potential of Nile perch stocks in Lake Victoria,” said Nyamweya, who proposes formalizing the fish maw trade to regulate harvesting and trading volumes.

Nyamweya emphasized the importance of continuous stock monitoring, adopting sustainable fishing practices, and finding value in other Nile perch parts to help fishermen create a sustainable livelihood and maintain future fish populations.

Other fish species in Lake Victoria are also badly depleted. A trader in Mwanza sold smoked lungfish, but they were imported from central Tanzania’s Tabora region, more than 300 kilometers away. “In the past there were lungfish in the lake, but now there are very few,” the trader told African Arguments.

In fact, hundreds of Lake Victoria’s fish species have gone extinct in the past three decades due to overfishing, illegal fishing, deforestation and pollution.

As African Arguments reported, the price of Nile tilapia, another popular fish for eating, has quintupled in five years despite increased competition from fish farms.

“You have to work hard to catch just one tilapia nowadays,” said a fisherman on Ukerewe, Lake Victoria’s largest island. “They are very difficult to find.”