Presentation short abstract

This paper provides ethnographic flesh for the notion ‘discards’ as a given form of waste-animal in relation to the operations of a fishmeal plant in Senegal. It contributes to theorizations of waste-animals in political more-than-human geography.

Presentation long abstract

This paper provides ethnographic flesh for the notion ‘discards’ as a given form of waste-animal in relation to the operations of a fishmeal plant in Senegal. Here and elsewhere alongst the West African seaboard, this industry has boomed over the past 15 years to meet the soaring demand for cheap protein that is increasingly needed to feed farmed animals globally. In Senegal’s largest artisanal fisheries town, a foreign fishmeal plant has been operating since 2009. Prior to its establishment at the request of local notables and state officials, fishers who successfully returned ashore with fish often discarded part of their catches at sea due to the rapid saturation of then available market gateways. In this paper, I show that the rendering of discarded fish as cumbersome waste-animals to be done away with was conducive to the establishment of the plant as a sanitary solution but soon-to-become burdensome extractive infrastructure. For the setting up of the plant would rapidly prompt intensified fisheries exploitation to supply distant markets, which in turn left local human populations increasingly at pain to access scarce and expensive fish for their everyday diets. I thus argue that discards – fish and otherwise – are best understood as slippery forms of un/desirable waste-animals whose situated in/utility to global capital fluctuates in relation to other asymmetrically valued human and nonhuman lives. This paper thus contributes to theorizations of waste-animals in political more-than-human geography by illuminating the logics that subtend their commodification and the grim effects thereof in postcolonial junctures.