ABDUL AZIZ Faye props a bare foot on the prow of his pirogue and nods towards the waves tumbling lazily on to the shore.
“There used to be a lot of fishermen here who went to Spain, but it has fallen a lot,” he says. “There were too many deaths.”
Faye, a stout 46-year-old who has been fishing the southern Senegalese coast for more than 30 years, is giving his pirogue a fresh lick of paint, the sweltering sun making the loud greens, yellows and reds glisten. The beach is lined with dozens of the multicoloured boats, nets and piles of rotting rubbish strewn all around them.
Faye has two wives and (counting them on his fingers) 13 children, “so I have to work a lot to feed them all”. But even for a fisherman of his experience, the sea is hard to rely on. “It depends. Some days you can get nothing at all. Other days, 10,000 CFA francs [€15] or more. It can be anything.”
Thiaroye-sur-Mer, a rundown coastal village about an hour’s drive from Senegal’s capital, Dakar, is synonymous with two pillars of the local economy: fishing and migration. Few locals don’t have a family member involved in one or the other.
Three years ago, when boats were leaving for Europe almost every week, Faye paid 400,000 CFA francs (€610) for a place on a large pirogue with about 80 other men. They got as far as Morocco before running out of fuel and abandoning the journey. He never made another attempt. Neither is he tempted to any longer. The crossings have all but stopped and he has moved on.
“I’m too tired for it now. It’s far away, Spain. It’s too far.”
Faye’s observation – that the number of people making for Europe by sea has been in steep decline of late – holds not only for Thiaroye-sur-Mer but for Senegal and the whole of west and north Africa.
Three years ago, reports of boatloads of Africans landing illegally in Spain, Italy and Greece could be found virtually every week. Senegalese pirogues came to symbolise the phenomenon. At the height of the traffic in 2007, says Papa Demba Fall, a migration specialist at Cheikh Anta Diop university in Dakar, would-be migrants were descending on Senegal from Ghana, Nigeria, Congo and further afield.
“I saw even Pakistanis show up looking for someone to bring them across,” Fall recalls.
Not so today. In the first nine months of this year, according to Frontex, the EU’s border agency, illegal border crossings in Spain’s Canary Islands – one of the most common landing points for Senegalese pirogues – have fallen by 99 per cent on last year. The trend is the same across the Mediterranean: illegal entry by sea is down by 65 per cent in Italy, 98 per cent in Malta and 27 per cent in mainland Spain.
There are three major reasons for the decline, analysts suggest. First, bilateral deals between southern European and African states have made it easier to ship migrants back to the sender country almost as soon as they arrive. Italy was the biggest recipient of illegal immigrants in Europe until it signed a pact with Libya and started turning thousands back. Spain has in the past three years stepped up co-operation with Senegal, Mauritania and other African countries, with similar effects.
“What happened was a change of course that saw sender countries take part in protecting the borders of countries to the north,” says Babacar Ndione of the International Organisation for Migration in Dakar. “That was a new development due, essentially, to the pirogue phenomenon.”
Second, the deployment of Frontex patrols along Africa’s Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts has made it more difficult for boats to set off for Europe undetected. In Soumbedioune, a seafront suburb of Dakar, Abdou Fall (32), who runs a stall at the local market and whose brother sailed by pirogue to Spain, says the explanation is simple.
“There are a lot of patrols,” he says of the Spanish and Senegalese ships that operate under Frontex’s banner and can occasionally be spotted from the shore. If you’re caught now, you can be put in prison for five or 10 years. People are afraid of trying.”
Finally, there’s the background to each of these developments: the economic crisis. The effect is difficult to measure, but Prof Demba Fall says the stories of hard times in Europe have filtered back to Senegalese families.
“They’re conscious of the crisis . . . Today, one Senegalese emigrant out of three isn’t working. You see them in northern Italy – they sit around the main square killing time, because they have no work. They understand what the crisis means.”
Back in Thiaroye-sur-Mer, Yayi Bayam Diouf, who runs a women’s group set up to warn families of the dangers of sending their children to Europe by sea, believes the crisis has had a powerful dissuasive impact.
“A young man in Europe, he calls his family and says, ‘Mother, send me some money, I don’t have enough to live on.’ That sort of thing has had an effect on people.”
While the illegal sea traffic has ebbed in recent years, the migration flow has not stopped in itself. Movement between African countries remains strong, while the evidence from Greece, where a sharp decline in illegal entries by sea coincided with a big rise in arrivals via the land border with Turkey, suggest a “balloon-squeezing” effect: applying pressure in one place produces a bulge in a weak spot somewhere else.
But for villages such as Thiaroye-sur-Mer, the shift is real and, for Yayi Bayam Diouf, not before time. Diouf created the women’s group in 2007, after her only son disappeared, aged 27, in a pirogue en route to Spain.
She was determined that other women should not suffer like she did.
“In February and March, there are very few fish along this coast, so many of the fishermen take their pirogues further north towards Mauritania,” she says, recounting her son’s last days.
“He phoned me from there to say there were hardly any fish and he had to go to Europe, through the Canary Islands. He said it wasn’t far. He said: ‘Say a prayer for me.’ So they left, and we never heard anything from them.”
The group organises education programmes and runs a micro-credit scheme as well as a shop where local women sell dolls, soap and other homemade products in the village. Their work, in a strongly patriarchal community where “men take the decisions”, has not gone unnoticed: a photo of French socialist Ségolène Royal meeting Diouf on a visit to Dakar has pride of place on the wall of their small office in Thiaroye.
Diouf is critical of Frontex, and of European states for making it difficult for Africans to enter legally. Ultimately, she says, what makes people take such a perilous journey is poverty and ignorance. “The young people don’t know the reality. Most of them have never gone to school – they go straight into the fishing,” she says.
“These huge resources that the European Union has given Frontex – if they gave them to communities like this one, people wouldn’t leave. Constraining people is not the answer. Educating people is what plays a big role.
“I’ve lost a child to clandestine emigration. When I speak, people listen to me. It means more to them than a Frontex ship.”
TOMORROW: As one of the largest cotton producers in the world, Mali was hit hard by the dramatic reduction in global demand for clothes immediately after the financial crisis began. This was compounded by a severe drought in 2009 and by continuing cotton subsidies for producers in rich countries.
This series, which explores the impact of the global recession on trends in the developing world through case studies in francophone west and north Africa, was supported by a grant from Irish Aid’s Simon Cumbers Media Fund.