The environmental cost of cage fish farming in East Africa
Fishermen harvest fish from cages in Lake Victoria off Nyagina Beach on Rusinga Island, Homa Bay County, on May 16, 2025. Cage fish farming is a threat to water quality, says a recent report.
At sunrise on Lake Victoria, floating cages, giant square enclosures suspended just below the water’s surface, now dot the shoreline from Jinja in Uganda to Kisumu in Kenya, replacing the traditional nets of many local fishermen in search of Nile perch and tilapia.
Within them, a new aquaculture frontier thrives as millions of fingerlings are fattened into table-sized fish, feeding East Africa’s growing appetite for animal protein.
