Erosion affects coastal communities around the world and the phenomenon increases due to climate change, but it is becoming an urgent environmental and social problem in Togo. The construction and the recent expansion of the autonomous deep waters port of Lomé has changed the sea’s currents with a devastating environmental impact: the ocean “eats” between 10 and 25 meters of coastline every year.
This has enormous consequences for the population living on the coast, and especially for the approximately 22,000 people who rely on fishing for a living.
The population of the small African country of the Gulf of Guinea is among the poorest in the world, and Togo is among the least developed countries in terms of human assets, economic vulnerability and gross national income per capita.
“We’ve been feeling for years like in an inexhaustible and perpetual shipwreck, and we do not see salvation” says Doèvi Abevi, the village chief of Baguida, one of the most affected areas, just a few km from Lomé; there, for example, the elementary school that hosts about 200 students, is now just a few meters away from the sea and risks collapsing in a few months. Whole villages disappear slowly at sea and with them the lives of people, their homes, activities, places of communities, markets, even cemeteries. The culture and traditions linked to the fishing and fish processing disappear too, as well as the spectacular beauty of those places.
Local people are looking for solutions to slow down the sea, raising fragile barriers, but it is an unequal struggle.
Victims and activists unite in associations and act on a political level to ask Togolese government and foreign investors of the port to find more solid and sustainable solutions to stop the erosion. But even this is an unequal struggle: the port of Lomé is an important source of revenue for Togo and is the only West African port from which ships can reach different capitals of the region in one day. Strong public and private investments have flowed into the port that ensures the largest economic income of the country.
The port still has to recognize any responsibility for coastal erosion caused by its construction, or propose any remedies to save entire communities from sinking.