The Ghana National Canoe Fishermen Council in the Central Region is calling on the government to stop the illegal transshipment of fish at sea, popularly called Saiko.

The call follows a one-week protest of fishermen as a result of the state of Ghana's artisanal fisheries which according to the Council is near collapse, due to the activities of industrial trawlers.

The fishermen say their one-week silent protest which ends on Tuesday would be followed by agitations across the four coastal regions of the country should government fail to intervene in the matter.

In a release signed by the Council’s PRO in the Central Region, Nana Kweigya, the group indicated that the small pelagic fish found within the Inshore Exclusive Zone, the sole preserve of artisanal fishers, has become the target of the industrial trawlers.

They are then harvested, frozen into pallets of fish, and sold to agents at high seas, who in turn sell them to the fishing communities for huge profits.

“This keeps going on while artisanal fishers wallow in abject poverty and hopelessness due to the wanton destruction of our livelihoods,” the statement read.

Saiko, he explained is severely destructive; a threat to not only food security and nutrition, but to jobs and income, and also national security.

In 2017, scientists warned that the small pelagic could collapse in the year 2020 if drastic measures were not taken.

“We are in 2020, and in our bumper harvest season (July-September), but artisanal fishers make very little or no catch from fishing expeditions; a confirmation of the warning by our revered scientists,” the Central Regional PRO, Nana Kweigya said in the statement.