Environmental drivers of migration attract more and more attention. This article focuses on the effect of fish stock depletion on migration in Africa and uses a novel dataset on fishing intensity (Kroodsma et al., 2018). First, based on a panel of the 37 African countries with access to the sea over the period 2012-2016, we show that within country variation in fishing intensity increases migration to OECD countries. Then, we opt for a micro approach in six countries for which we have geocoded household data. We show that industrial fishing is reducing household size in coastal villages. We find that, at the 3rd quartile of fishing conditions, a 1% increase in the past industrial fishing hours decreases a household by 0.073 member, and by 17% the average proportion of young men aged between 15 and 30 years old within each household. This gap signals a departure, lausibly caused by the competition created by industrial fishing vessels overfishing their nearby seas and depleting fish stocks.