The Price of Your Cheap Tilapia
Slow Food International’s President: “Fish Farming on Lake Victoria is a lethal ecological threat”
As my readers know, writers from various backgrounds occasionally contribute posts this Medium page. This week’s essay is written by Edward (Edie) Mukiibi president of the global Slow Food movement.
The lives of forty million people depend on fish from the waters of Lake Victoria, the world’s largest tropical and second largest freshwater lake, whose shores are shared by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Today, however, the basin is a paradise under threat, from pollution, weeds, overexploitation of its resources, climate change, and an abnormal increase in the number of fish farming cages.
I live in Uganda on my family farm, barely 15 kilometers from the northern shores of Lake Victoria. Until a few years ago, I used to travel down to them on the hot days of January and July. As recently as ten years ago, local communities were still using canoes and nets to fish for tilapia, silver fish, catfish, and the rarer lung fish, all used in the traditional cooking of the region.
There used to be two different classes on the lake: one consisted of fishers with small boats who fished close to shore, another of small-scale commercial fishers with motorboats, which…
