ON a beach south of Ivory Coast’s economic hub Abidjan, a group of fishermen are spending the day sitting in the shade and playing cards.

Normally, they would be out on their boats – long canoes known as pirogues –and hunting the seas.

But this month, they have been banned from doing so to help the country’s badly depleted fisheries recover.

“We can’t do anything, we can’t do anything at all,” said Patrick Ange Yao, a fisherman since the turn of the century.

“We sit here, we chat,” he said. “We don’t even know where to go – we just go around in circles.”

Overfishing compounded by climate change has left the waters off the West African state alarmingly void of a decent catch.

In May, the government announced an “annual biological rest period” in the nation’s 200,000 sq km exclusive economic zone.