Port Sudan fish landings rose in September, SUNA reports

Sudan News Agency (SUNA) published a monthly monitoring update on 22 October for September fish landings at the central fish market in Port Sudan. It quoted Mohamed Abdelhamid al-Iraqi of the marine fisheries statistics section in the Red Sea state’s Ministry of Production and Economic Resources. The reported quantity was about 82,059 kilograms, or approximately 82.1 tonnes.

SUNA compared that with 70.1 tonnes in August and reported a September daily average of 2.8 tonnes. The report attributed the increase to relatively stable weather and calmer seas, which enabled fishers to go out, as well as strong demand for fish. These are explanations reported by the source; it did not provide an independent causal analysis.

The report said about 41% of September landings came from the north, 50% from the south and 9% from the central area. It did not explain the boundaries of those regional categories or specify which catch types were included. The shares should therefore be read as the monitoring report’s north-south-central breakdown for Port Sudan, not generalized to national fish production.

SUNA also gave price ranges of 30,000 to 50,000 for first-grade Nagel-Rishal fish and 16,000 to 35,000 for other species, but did not clearly state the currency or price unit. Those figures cannot be presented as comparable price statistics. The report further quoted an explanation that fuel and other input costs, together with unreliable electricity that raised ice costs, continued to challenge fishers and traders.

The Port Sudan figure is a local market measure rather than a national catch series. PERSGA, the regional Red Sea and Gulf of Aden organisation, described in October 2025 how it was building standardised fisheries data with Sudan and other coastal states. Its frame surveys were designed to record vessels, gear, fishing effort, species composition and landing sites as inputs to stock assessment and future catch monitoring. That programme is a separate data exercise from the September market total reported by SUNA; the agency report does not say that its 82.1-tonne estimate was produced under PERSGA’s survey protocol.

Port Sudan’s fish market has also been the focus of a separate redevelopment effort. MIPRO-Sud reported a four-day cleanup in February 2026 involving more than 100 market operators and community volunteers, and said plans for a full renovation that year included water systems, fish-preservation facilities and renewable energy. That project account does not document completion; it provides local context for the market and the preservation costs cited by fishers in SUNA’s September report.

The new monitoring data indicate higher September landings in Port Sudan than in the preceding month. The source does not provide a full fisheries methodology, sampling frame, species-level quantities or national figures for the same period. The totals should therefore remain scoped to the local monthly monitoring as reported by SUNA.