“It’s okay, I’ll be able to leave. “ After loading dozens of liters of gasoline on board his boat, Salim smokes a last cigarette on the shore, in Mayotte, in the Comoros archipelago (Indian Ocean). A Coelacanth, this Comorian brand that transits under the radar between Anjouan and the French island.
It is on this same boat that the young fisherman arrived in Mayotte, in 2016, at the end of his studies. “There was no future there [à Anjouan], I had to leave to live ”, he delivers briefly.
“You know, here, all the fishermen are Anjouanais”, he explains. Me, I had never taken the sea before getting on a kwassa [canot de pêche comorien], but when I got there, it was the only thing that was offered to me, so I accepted. No choice, I had no papers. At first it was awful. I was scared all the time ”, recalls Salim.
“It’s a prehistoric fishery! The guys leave with hundreds of liters of gasoline in cans for several days. A flame and everything explodes. They have no GPS, no [radio] VHF, nothing. Zero equipment, often not even a life jacket ”, comments Ludovic Olive, a fishing captain who, after having crisscrossed the seas of the globe, enlisted in the only structured fishery on the island. “We don’t see that anywhere else, especially not in a French department”, assures the sailor.
At his side, his boss, at the head of Cap’tain Alandor, nods. For Régis Masséaux, everything remains to be done to hope to see the sector prosper. “Before departmentalization [en 2011], everyone went where they wanted and it didn’t bother anyone. But the rules have changed, not the practices. Let us add to this that Mayotte became an outermost European region in 2014, and it is a bunch of new standards that we are caught in the nose! So far, we have succeeded in negotiating exemptions, but this is no longer possible ”, analyzes the historical player in local fishing.
“The problem is that of costs”
Since the start of 2021, each boat must, for example, have a French captain on board. Another huge project: the renewal of the fleet. Indeed, like the boat of Salim, hardly any boat meets the standards. They are also not armed to navigate so far offshore.
The department and the state have undertaken to massively subsidize the purchase of new boats
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