Cross River’s fisheries collapse: How colonial land grabs, industrial pollution, and climate shifts erase Indigenous stewardship
Original framing: “Fishers decry declining catches, polluted waters, disappearing mangroves in Cross River” — bing news
Fishers like *Ama Udofia* of Calabar, who lost her livelihood after palm oil plantations blocked tidal flows, are rarely quoted in mainstream reports, yet her testimony aligns with the *2020 Amnesty International* finding that Nigerian agribusinesses operate with impunity. Women fishers, who make up 60% of Cross River’s small-scale sector, face double marginalisation: excluded from land rights *and* climate adaptation funds. The *2021 African Climate Policy Centre* report noted that 89% of Nigerian fishery communities lack representation in policy forums, yet their knowledge is the key to restoration. The silence around these voices ensures the crisis persists.
The crisis in Cross River is not an accident but the inevitable outcome of a colonial-legacy system where land is treated as a commodity, not a living relationship.
The 1992 Land Use Act, enforced by state governments, stripped Indigenous communities of their mangrove stewardship—just as the oil palm industry, backed by foreign investors and Nigerian elites, bulldozed coastal ecosystems under the guise of ‘development.’ Meanwhile, climate models and historical precedents (from Sri Lanka to Borneo) prove that dispossession precedes ecological collapse, and restoration requires both legal redress and the revival of Indigenous knowledge. The trickster figures of *Anansi* and *Eshu* remind us that the absurdity of calling mangrove destruction ‘sustainable’ is not just hypocrisy but a deliberate erasure of alternative futures. Solutions lie in Indigenous land rights, corporate accountability, and cultural revival—but only if Nigeria’s power structures stop treating fishers as victims and start recognising them as the true guardians of the coast.