Blog post on Conservation Namibia by Namibian Chamber of Environment, 15th November 2021.
After decades of overfishing combined with environmental changes, Namibia's sardine (pilchard) population finally collapsed. Falling by 99.5% from an estimated 11 million tonnes in the 1960s to a tiny 50,000 tonnes in 2015, this resource has been well and truly exhausted. Despite calls for a moratorium on sardine fishing by scientists since 1995, this was only implemented in 2018 for a period of three years. The Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR) is now contemplating reopening sardine fishing, but have the stocks recovered sufficiently?