Along the shores of Maputo’s Pescadores fishing community, dozens of small wooden boats sit idle in the water. The fishermen who own them are not resting. They cannot afford to go out. Rising fuel prices, triggered by disruptions in global energy markets linked to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, have pushed the cost of a day’s fishing beyond what many of them can sustain. The boats stay anchored. The families go without.
In early May, Mozambique’s energy regulator announced a significant fuel price increase, raising petrol prices by 12 percent and diesel prices by nearly 46 percent. The government attributed the hike to disruptions in global fuel supply caused by the Middle East conflict. The announcement triggered long queues at filling stations and reduced fuel availability across the country. For the fishing communities of Maputo’s Costa do Sol coastline, where approximately 1,800 fishermen and nearly 290 boats depend on daily catches for survival, the impact was immediate and severe.
Carlos Silvestre Nguenha, Vice President of the Community Council of Fishermen in Maputo, has watched his community absorb the consequences of a crisis it had no part in creating. His response to it is not angry. It is something more unusual and more moving: a direct appeal to the parties at war. “We appeal to the countries that are in conflict, because these conflicts don’t only affect those countries, they affect the whole world, because this precious liquid doesn’t just help Iran, it doesn’t just help the United States of America, it helps the whole world. So we appeal to them to sit down and talk so that we can overcome this confusion that is happening because it affects the world in general.” It is a quiet and dignified plea from a man whose community has no leverage in the negotiations that will determine their fate, and who is appealing to the conscience of those who do.
The effects run through every layer of the community. Fish traders, many of whom rely entirely on daily sales to feed their families, have seen their incomes collapse alongside the reduction in daily catch. Martinha Djive, a fish seller in the community, described the human cost with painful clarity. “When there’s no fuel, what you do affects us so much because our children don’t go to school, we don’t have money to buy rice, or anything else. First, because we’re not studying and we’re not doing anything, our children depend on this place.” The chain from geopolitics to a child missing school is shorter and more direct than most people sitting far from Maputo would ever imagine.
The damage extends well beyond fishing. Fuel is foundational to how any economy moves, and in a country as fragile as Mozambique, a sharp increase in energy costs sends shockwaves through transportation, commerce, food supply, and the basic cost of daily life. Teresa Boene, an economist and researcher at the Centre for Public Integrity, put it plainly. “Fuel is the engine of the economy, and when there is a fuel shortage or when its price increases, one thing leads to another. A fuel shortage tends to put pressure on price increases, and this will trigger a chain reaction of increases in the prices of products and services on the market.” For households already operating on the thinnest of margins, that chain reaction is not an abstract economic concern. It is a direct and immediate threat to survival.
The numbers that frame Mozambique’s vulnerability are stark. According to the World Bank, more than 80 percent of the population lives on less than three dollars a day. The country consistently ranks among the poorest in the world, and the domestic economic challenges it already faces leave almost no room to absorb external shocks of the kind that global energy disruptions deliver. There is no cushion. There is no buffer. When the price of diesel nearly doubles, the consequences arrive immediately and fall hardest on the people with the least.
This is the story that global conflicts rarely tell about themselves. The negotiations, the military operations, and the political statements that dominate international coverage of the Middle East situation are happening in a world that feels entirely disconnected from a fishing village in Maputo. But the connection is real, and it is financial, and it is being felt every morning that a Mozambican fisherman looks at his boat, calculates the cost of fuel, and decides he cannot afford to go to sea. The boats sit in the water. The world moves on. And in Pescadores, families are waiting for a crisis they did not cause to finally let them get back to work.
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