Sea Grant Spotlight: Meet Kifle Hagos

A small country in the Horn of Africa, Eritrea has seen its share of the political problems that have plagued other emerging nations, says Kifle W. Hagos, once Eritrea’s director of fisheries management in the Ministry of Fisheries. Formerly an Italian colony, federated by the United Nations with Ethiopia following Italy’s defeat in World War II, and annexed by Ethiopia in 1961, Eritrea won its independence in May 1991 after a 30-year war of liberation.  “It is a relatively new sovereign country that has shown a promising development progress during its first decade of independence. In its teen years, however, its citizens are experiencing difficult socio-economic and political conditions due to natural and human causes. The human causes result from tyrannical rule,  the non-participatory nature of its government, and the failure of the U.N. in enforcing its own decision on the border dispute with Ethiopia, which has left the country in no-war no-peace circumstances—an excuse the government uses to continue to rule by decree, ” Hagos says.

Hagos left the country in 2001 to pursue a master’s degree in environmental studies at Brown University. This was not long after Eritrea’s two-year border war with Ethiopia, a war Hagos describes as “very destructive, totally affecting the economy and political life of the country.”

After the war, Hagos says, “Many people, including high government officials, started to raise questions.” Most of those who openly raised their voices have since been imprisoned, deprived of the due process of the law, Hagos says. While at Brown, the internal political discontent worsened. His wife Wunesh and his sons Senai, now 14, and Hiab, now 10, joined him in Rhode Island in 2002 for what was to be a summer visit. The family has since decided “to stay here and avoid political problems.”
Hagos, now a URI Ph.D. candidate in environmental sciences, with an emphasis on aquaculture, applied to URI’s Coastal Institute IGERT program (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) and was accepted in 2006, with Barry Costa-Pierce as his advisor. His research for the first one-and-a-half years focused on mussel culture, but the infestation of mussels in local waters with pea crabs proved problematic, and Hagos wondered, “What am I going to do with this once I am back home in Africa?”

Eritrea has a long coastline bordered by a hot, dry, semi-desert strip and suffers from water shortages, and Hagos was interested in projects that could generate food production and extra income from limited local coastal resources.  That includes fish culture by systems integration, such as the integration of fish and plant production, recirculation of water, use of renewable sources of energy, and recycling of wastes. He is planning to do his dissertation research on integrated aquaculture systems. These take different forms, he explains, describing as an example a commercial-scale integrated seawater farming system practiced in Eritrea in 1997-2002 by an American scientist in which sea water was pumped into shrimp ponds, circulated from there to marine tilapia ponds, and then ultimately used to irrigate salicornia fields. The excess water was used to develop wetlands in the dry coastal lands where mangrove trees were grown to cover the sandy coasts, thus beneficially using the nutrients the water accumulates from aquaculture wastes, and avoiding returning polluted water to the sea. He also describes integrating agriculture and aquaculture in their various forms, such as using sea shells and processing offal as feed in poultry farms.

“I have just mentioned very few of the possibilities, but there are many aspects of fish culture, agriculture, and animal husbandry that could be integrated and used in synergy” Hagos says, and adds that he hopes to conduct his dissertation on community-based integrated aquaculture systems that could be implemented at the village level or that can benefit other communities such as schools, universities, and even individual families.

Through his IGERT fellowship, Hagos is spending the spring and summer interning for the R.I. Department of Environmental Management, Division of Fish and Wildlife, which runs four fish hatcheries in Rhode Island. He will be focusing on improving the quality of the water that the Lafayette Trout Hatchery in North Kingstown discharges via the Annaquatucket River to the Belleville Pond. As part of his IGERT internship, he is visiting other hatcheries around New England to develop recommendations for best management practices to DEM, which he will present at the end of the summer.

Hagos describes Eritrea as a place of strong community ties and close-knit families, where people of diverse ethnicity and beliefs leave in harmony with and respect for each other. Though he says his children quickly adjusted to life in America—“Now they are no different than their American friends. Children learn fast.”—he hopes to return to eastern Africa, preferably Eritrea, in a few years, after he has completed his degree.
“There are many things in our part of the world I think I could contribute to,” he says, “My service, my experience will be much in need there. I would like to contribute to the development that is going on in Eritrea, in particular, and in Africa, in general.”