‘Go to Spain.’ You hear it over and again in fishing communities in the Senegalese city of Saint-Louis. Work in one of Spain’s many greenhouses or sign onto a trawler, say locals strapped for employment. It’s easy work compared to continuing to hope for a catch on the rough waters of the Atlantic where nets have to be hauled by hand.
A Saint-Louis fisher in his mid-thirties, Demba Diaw paid traffickers €500 ($544) for passage to the Canary Islands in October 2023. There were 239 other passengers on board, five of them children. He left because the fish were disappearing.
