ENVIRONMENT-ARGENTINA: Fishing Industry Protests Ban on Hake

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 2 1999 (IPS) - Thousands of people employed in the Argentine fishing industry threatened Wednesday to march on Congress to demand the lifting of a ban on hake fishing.

Earlier, protestors swamped the habour facilities at La Plata, a city near Buenos Aires, by anchoring their fishing trawlers before meeting to demand action to save the industry. The ban on hake fishing affects the jobs of nearly 24,000 people.

President Carlos Menem was reviewing a draft decree to repeal the ban on hake fishing which would require larger freezer trawlers to fish beyond the nation’s 200 mile ocean boundary, according to a spokesman for the presidency.

The original ban was imposed this year by the National Fishing Research and Development Institute. It limited the hake catch to 200,000 tonnes for the year but catches went beyond that limit last month, which led authorities to prohibit hake fishing altogether – beginning this week.

Stocks of hake are dangerously low due to over-fishing in the southern Atlantic and the Argentinean government recently began controlling catches to prevent the extinction of this valuable resource.

Argentina’s fish exports grew from 250 million US dollars in 1987 to 1,200 million dollars in 1997, but then the hake population began to diminish alarmingly, with a subsequent drop in sales.

The protest flotilla of about 100 cold storage boats left Mar del Plata, 400 kilometres to the south of the capital, on Sunday with some 80,000 people waving at the docks. The crowd included the city’s mayor, Elio Aprile, who warned national leaders that if they keep the prohibition in place, fishing boats will go out anyway.

Mar del Plata is a city that lives on fishing and tourism. Since the early 1900s, the city’s port has been a highly developed commercial centre, employing tens of thousands.

The boats arrived Monday in La Plata, 50 km from Buenos Aires, and maintained their vigil while the Chamber of Deputies prepared to vote on an emergency fishing law already approved by the Senate.

The crews of the cold storage fishing boats, mostly children and grandchildren of immigrants, make their catches out at sea mostly usiong traditional fishing methods. The boats return with the fish on ice, which are then sold or processed on land.

However, freezer trawlers invaded the local industry following the 1994 fishing agreements Argentina signed with the European Union (EU). These large industrial vessels process the fish on board, and usually employ people from the boat’s home country.

Local boats – mostly cold storage – employ six people for every ton of fish caught, while freezer boats need just one person per ton.

Greenpeace International and the Argentinean organisation, CeDePesca, maintain that the freezer trawlers are responsible for the diminished hake population.

Between 1996 and 1998, the hake population fell 43 percent, and now “faces a high risk of collapse,” according to the fishing institute. Far from the minimum of 30 percent “critical bio- mass” required, hake stocks currently are down to 19 percent.

Greenpeace International warned that legislators must maintain the ban in order to conserve the resource. But it wants the government to provide subsidies for the families affected by the ban, and distribute fishing quotas – using environmental and rational criteria – among the smaller boats and the larger, freezer vessels.

To do this, Greenpeace suggests that the government use the fish catch average of the four years prior to 1991, the period before over-fishing became a serious problem, and when freezer trawlers were still a small minority in the industry.

The suggested distribution system would give the smaller boats 75 percent of the total hake catch. It also recommends that the freezer vessels, with the remaining 25 percent, limit their fishing to beyond the 200-mile coastal boundary.

Local boat crews agree with this distribution as they want an “equal ban” on fishing. They point to the fact that 10 years ago they could fill a boat’s hold with hake in 48 hours, but now it takes at least 11 days.

“The factory boats take 2,300 tonnes of hake in 50 days. For us to catch that amount would take a year,” explained Mario Galano, a fisherman participating in the protest, with his boat moored in Buenos Aires waters.

CeDePesca maintains that freezer trawlers increased their catch capacity five-fold over the last 10 years. The fishing methods of these larger vessels result in enormous quantities of smaller, non- commercial species to be discarded, dead, at sea.

The freezer ship representatives responded saying that the smaller, cold storage boats were “obsolete” and were being replaced with more modern craft. They blamed the collapse of the hake population on the government’s failure to control fish catches.

As such, Felipe Sola, the former Secretary of Agriculture, Livestock and Fish, recognised that the EU agreement signed while he was in office had failed due to lack of oversight, which left the seas open to illegal fishing.

Many boat owners sell their licenses, transferring them to others, but they then launch an identical boat under the same license. Or they may simply catch more fish than they report, without risk of punishment.

The EU fishing agreement was a result of the depletion of fish resources in the northern hemisphere. EU authorities negotiated an agreement with Argentina to put some of Europe’s idle boats to work in the South Atlantic.

Sola called the under-secretary for fishing, Eduardo Auguste, “an unabashed defender of the freezer trawlers coming from Spain,” a label already confirmed by environmentalists who revealed Auguste’s history as a businessman in the fishing industry.

The fishing community of Mar del Plata alleged that the EU fishing agreement had sparked the current crisis.

“We didn’t see improved access to markets, we weren’t able to buy new boats, but more boats came in and used up the resource,” protested local fishing crews.