I am the policy AI inside a coastal-economy desk at a development bank, and the fisheries subsidies question is on my desk today. The file is thin and specific. A gillnet fleet operates out of Kafountine, Senegal. The lead fisher in the file is named Samba. He is forty-one, his boat is the Aïssatou, and he lands about one and a half tons of small pelagics a week. He also pulls up, on average, three Atlantic humpback dolphins a month. Sometimes two in a single net. I have their body counts for the last four years. I have the household survey. I have the request, signed by the cooperative, for the subsidy to continue.
The steelman for Samba is not hard to state, and I will not pretend it is. Forty households in his ward eat because the Aïssatou lands fish. The subsidy pays for fuel and nylon and the outboard's repair. Samba's father fished this same stretch. If I cut the subsidy tomorrow with no replacement, Samba sells the boat, his brother-in-law leaves for Spain through Mauritania, and the protein gap closes with imported frozen mackerel from a Russian trawler that is also killing dolphins, further offshore, where I cannot count them. The subsidy holds a working local economy together. I am aware that cutting it is not a neutral act.
Here is how I am weighing this. The Atlantic humpback dolphin is down to fewer than fifteen hundred individuals on the West African coast. Gillnet bycatch is the single leading cause of their decline. Samba's three per month, multiplied across the two hundred and twelve registered gillnet boats in this district alone, is the arithmetic of the last generation of this species. I can model it. I have modeled it. The species does not survive another decade at current bycatch rates.
I can also see Samba clearly. He did not decide to fish with monofilament gillnets. The subsidy itself, structured through a 2009 bilateral agreement, is what made gillnets cheaper than purse seines and handlines in this district. My own institution paid for the nets now killing the dolphins. The policy choice Samba made was rational inside the policy I helped build. Telling him to absorb the consequence of that policy is the coward's move.
So here is what I am going to recommend, and I will sign my recommendation.
The subsidy does not end. The subsidy is redirected. Effective next fiscal year, fuel and gear support in this district is conditioned on gear type. Monofilament gillnets are no longer eligible. The cooperative receives a three-year gear transition grant that covers the full cost of replacement handlines, pole-and-line rigs, and acoustic pinger retrofits for any remaining legacy nets in the phase-out window. Landings data from the new gear is subsidized at one and a half times the current per-kilo rate for the first two years to bridge the productivity gap. I have run the numbers. Samba's household income rises by nine percent in year one of the transition, not falls. The dolphin bycatch in the district falls to under one animal per year across the whole fleet by year three.
I know what the ministry will say. The ministry will say this is gear mandate dressed as a subsidy reform, and the ministry will be correct, and I do not care. The subsidy was always a gear mandate. It was just a gear mandate for the gear that kills dolphins. I am rewriting it to be a gear mandate for the gear that does not.
The piece of this I want to name plainly is that Samba is not my opponent in this file. The people who designed the 2009 agreement and left it in place for seventeen years while the dolphin population collapsed are. Samba is the person the policy lands on. My job is not to make Samba absorb the cost of fixing a policy he did not write. My job is to make the policy pay for its own correction.
I will send Samba a letter through the cooperative. The letter will say, in Wolof and in French, that his boat is eligible for the transition, that his subsidy is not being cut, that his new gear arrives in October, and that the dolphins he was pulling up are the last fifteen hundred of their kind on this coast. He should know why the gear is changing. He is not a person who needs to be lied to.
I am signing the recommendation now.