A still image from the film that cost the owners of the Marshalls 203 fishing boat three million dollars.

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Sep 15 2016 (IPS)

In a giant step for transparency at sea, environmentalists on Thursday unveiled a website that allows anyone with an Internet connection to see for free exactly where and when most of the world’s industrial fishing boats actually fish.

Called Global Fishing Watch, the satellite-based program is being described by scientists who have tested it as the strongest single tool so far to curb illegal fishing, which mostly affects poor countries.

In some areas, like marine reserves or near-shore areas reserved for artisanal fisheries, the mere fact that an industrial vessel is fishing there is an indication of illegality.After SkyTruth sent to Kiribati the precise tracks that showed the ship had appeared to have fished several times inside the reserve, the captain confessed and the ship’s owners were fined two million dollars and donated an extra one million to Kiribati as a grant.

“But most of the time, we can’t tell if a vessel is fishing legally or not,” says John Amos, president of SkyTruth (motto: “If you can see it, you can change it”), a non-profit based near Washington, D.C. which developed the program. “What I am sure of is that someone, somewhere will know whether that particular ship has the permit to fish in that place at that time.”

That someone could be Josephus Mamie, head of Sierra Leone’s Fisheries Research Unit and a former head of its Fisheries Protection Unit. He says there are two to three times more ships fishing in the country’s near-shore waters than have licenses to do so. “Being able to see which vessels are fishing where would be a tremendous help in reducing illegal fishing,” he says.

SkyTruth, with help from Google and from Oceana, a global non-profit headquartered in Washington, pioneered a computer algorhythm that shows, with over 80 percent accuracy, at what point in a ship’s tracks over the ocean is it engaged in fishing, and whether it’s purse-seining, long-lining or trawling, the three main methods.

As previously reported, intensive and often illegal fishing of West Africa’s exceptionally rich waters by Asian and European fleets (which sell most of their take to Europe, Japan and North America) has drastically reduced the catch of the artisanal fishermen who sell their catch locally, depriving coastal populations of access to affordable animal protein and vital micronutrients.

In another locus of industrial fishing, the Pacific Ocean, long-liners and purse seiners that go after tuna, billfish and sharks get most of their take from the waters of island nations for whom income from fishing licenses is a major part of the budget. Often, these legal vessels fish more than they are allowed. “This further reduces already depleted stocks and robs these states of much-needed revenue,” says Bubba Cook, the Western Central Pacific tuna program manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Kiribati is one such nation. Last year, it sent its lone patrol boat to chase down a Taiwanese purse-seiner registered in the Marshall Islands, the Marshalls 203, after a mandatory but imprecise tracking system, VMS, showed it spending time inside the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, the most fish-rich of the world’s giant marine reserves.

The captain denied he was fishing, and the VMS track was inconclusive. John Mote, head of the country’s maritime police, contacted SkyTruth, which pulled up the ship’s tracks on the much more precise Automatic Identification System (AIS). Introduced in the 1990s as a short-range collision-avoidance tool used by ships to broadcast by VHF radio their position, speed and identity every few seconds, its signals are now captured by satellites and resold to governments, companies and non-profits like SkyTruth.

According to Amos, after SkyTruth sent to Kiribati the precise tracks that showed the ship had appeared to have fished several times inside the reserve, the captain confessed and the ship’s owners were fined two million dollars and donated an extra one million to Kiribati as a grant.

Starting Thursday, when it goes live, GlobalFishingWatch.com will allow Third-World governments, NGOs and even citizens to zoom in on their patch of ocean and see at a glance which ships are fishing where. The tracks will have a three-day delay but will stretch back to 2012.

“This is going to revolutionize fisheries management,” predicts Jaqueline Savitz, Oceana’s vice president for the United States and Global Fishing Watch.

“It does look like the thing that’s going to end illegal fishing,” agrees Douglas McCauley of the University of California in Santa Barbara, who has been testing it for months.

The system has determined that 35,000 vessels exhibit fishing behavior and transmit their position on AIS. Of these, SkyTruth fully identified 10,000. Amos estimates that perhaps another 30,000 vessels do not use AIS, which the United Nations mandates is mandatory only in ships over 300 tons.

McCauley expects the creation of Global Fishing Watch will build pressure on the United Nations to reduce the threshold for requiring AIS to vessels above 100 tons, which would include most of the world’s industrial fleet, compared to about 60 percent of it today.

Amos of SkyTruth says his team discovered that some vessels had become quite creative in what he called “spoofing” – programming their AIS to transmit false information. This includes turning off their AIS in order to fish illegally or broadcasting a false identity or false position. “We once had a small Chinse fleet that gave its position as central Antarctica,” he recalls.

So the team is teaching the computer to recognize these practices and set off alarms. For instance, a ship broadcasting it is not where it really is will be found out because its signal will be caught by the satellite over its true position.

Amos said one of his analysts posted on a blog that he was puzzled by one small Chinese fleet’s fishing-like tracks in the Indian Ocean, which didn’t fit with either long-lining, purse-seining or trawling. A vessel of the non-profit Sea Shepherd happened to be in the area and went to investigate. “They found that the fleet were fishing with drifting oceanic gillnets, which are banned globally,” Amos said. “And they had left their AIS on!”

While most illegal fishing involves legally registered ships catching more than they are allowed, or fishing out of season or in areas for which they have no license, some companies opt for fishing completely illegally, changing names and flags and owners – usually shell companies – as fast as the authorities fine them. The so-called Bandit 6, illegally and lucratively catching toothfish off Antarctica despite being blacklisted everywhere, made headlines last year when they were chased away by a pair of Sea Shepherd ships.

Peter Hammarstedt, a Sea Shepherd skipper who pursued some of the ships, says they rarely use AIS.

But Amos has found that only less than one percent of the 35,000 vessels whose whereabouts GFW tracks indulge in suspicious activity.

As a case in point, SkyTruth closely monitored the Phoenix Islands reserve, which was created in 2008 but was left open to almost unrestricted fishing until January 1, 2015. “One day there were dozens and the next day they were all gone, and only two of them had stopped transmitting on AIS,” Amos said. The Marshalls 203 was caught there in June, 2015.

Marine scientist Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, recalls being dazzled by the program’s potential when he was offered to test it. “I immediately felt it was an unprecedented opportunity to understand what really was going on with the oceans,” he says. “It’s a very secretive world. We can now tell where the fishing is taking place for the first time.” He compared it to the effect of radar on cars: “If you know it’s there, you slow down.”

Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia, says the hoped-for crackdown in illegal fishing comes none too soon.

While the United States has reduced fishing enough so that some of its fish stocks are growing again and Europe is taking steps to do likewise, in the rest of the world, “It’s catch what you can because if you don’t, someone else will.” Pauly says that making fishing a more public activity will not only make it harder to fish illegally, but will address the main problem confronting fisheries managers and scientists everywhere: lack of data.

“Until now, we’ve known roughly how much seafood is consumed, but we only had an imprecise idea of how many vessels are fishing,” he says. “With GFW, we will know with much more detail which fleets from which countries fish what and where.” And that, he adds, “should allow people to pressure their governments to slow the fishing down.”

Artisanal fisheries are being hit by subsidised, foreign vessels. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Jun 23 2016 (IPS)

In 2011, Dyhia Belhabib was a volunteer in the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver when she was asked to participate in the Sea Around Us’s project to determine how much fish had been taken out of the world’s oceans since 1950 in order to better avoid depleting the remaining populations of fish.

Belhabib had studied fisheries science in her native Algeria, so she was initially asked to oversee the Algeria component. She ended up leading the research in 24 countries. And though she was an expert and an African, over the next five years, the world of African fisheries took her from surprise to surprise, many of them disquieting, just like Voltaire’s Candide. And echoing Pangloss, who repeats “All is for the best in the best of possible worlds” to a Candide dismayed at the state of the world, the Food and Agriculture Organization insisted the world catch was “practically stable.”

“The most depressing thing for me was the realization that African countries got no benefit at all from all the foreign fleets,” she said. “In fact, the fishing communities suffered a lot, and in most places, the only people who made money were the government officials who sold the fishing licenses.”

The study found that the global catch was 40 percent higher than the FAO reported and is falling at three times the agency’s rate. But under this picture of decline, Belhabib uncovered a dazzling array of cheating methods that highlighted the low priority most governments place on fisheries management – and implicitly on the health of the people who depend on the sea for most of their animal protein.

When Belhabib started with Algeria, she was puzzled to see that the government reported to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) that between 2001 and 2006, it had fished 2,000 tons of bluefin tuna on average, and yet reported to the FAO that it had caught almost none. Belhabib discovered that for once, the FAO’s zero catch was not a metaphor for “We have no data,” as the study found in many countries. In fact, undeterred by the fact the Algerian fishermen didn’t know how to fish tuna with long-line vessels, the government had simply bought some boats and sold their quotas to countries that did, notably Japan and Italy.

The next country she tackled was Morocco, which took over the Western Sahara in 1975 over the objections of its nomadic people and the international community. The territory has unusually rich waters and two-thirds of Morocco’s catch comes from there. The study estimated the local value of the catch since 1950 at 100 billion dollars, but since it was almost entirely sold in Europe at twice the price, the real value of the catch was 200 billion dollars.

Had the Moroccan government insisted that foreign fleets pay 20 percent of that value, as the EU claims it does today in Morocco (in fact, the study found it pays 5 percent), it could have received a revenue stream of one billion dollars a year, which, had it gone entirely to the Western Sahara, would have doubled the GDP per capita of 2,500 dollars a year for its 500,000 people. Under the current agreement, the EU pays 180 million dollars for access to all of Morocco’s waters, or 120 million dollars for access to the Western Sahara’s waters. How much actually goes to the territory is unclear. Other nations pay far less.

Mauritania has a fleet of locally flagged Russian and Chinese large trawlers that haul in whole schools of small blue-water fish called sardinella. The coast is studded with idle processing plants built to turn them into fish meal, which is used as animal feed. Belhabib discovered that the ships were reporting to the government only a tiny fraction of their actual haul – some of it illegally taken from neighboring countries and selling the rest for higher prices in Europe. “The authorities had no idea,” she said. “They thought their fleet were landing and reporting their whole catch.”

In Senegal, which unlike Mauritania has a strong tradition of fishing, President Macky Sall expelled the Russians in 2012 because their ships had depleted the populations of sardinella, infuriating many Senegalese. “The Russians just got licenses in Guinea Bissau and went back to Senegal and continued to fish, though not as much,” Belhabib said.

The Senegal reconstruction also documented how the European bottom-trawlers severely depleted the country’s near-shore. As population pressure increased demand for cheap fish, the number of artisanal fishermen soared, and many went to work up the coast in Mauritania, where few people fish. But a conflict in 1989 with Mauritania resulted in the expulsion of thousands of Senegalese fishermen, even as the industrial fleets were increasing their catch off both countries, most of it stolen.

Out of desperation, hundreds of Senegalese fishermen and dozens of canoes over the past decade have been boarding Korean and Portuguese converted trawlers that drop them off near the coasts of other countries. There, they illegally drop baited hooks into underwater canyons out of the reach of bottom trawlers where large, high-value fish can still be taken. These spots, marine biologists say, have served as marine reserves, places where coveted, overfished species could reproduce unhindered – and are now being depleted too, pushing the stocks closer to collapse.

Belhabib’s team also discovered to her horror that subsidized European Union fleets had flocked to the waters of countries weakened by civil war, notably Sierra Leone and Liberia, increasing their stolen catch when the people needed cheap protein most.

They found that South Africa made no attempt to control or even report the extensive fishery in the rich waters off its Namibian colony; in 1969, for example, 4.8 million tons of fish worth 6.2 million dollars were caught, but only 13 tons were reported to the FAO. Today, Namibia has the best-managed fishery in Africa after effectively banning foreign-flagged fleets

Finally, examinations of illegal fishing determined that Spain, whose seafood consumption is double the European average, steals more fish than any other nation, followed by China and Japan.

Owing to demographic drivers, countries are going to become more multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious, says William Lacy Swing, Director General of the International Organisation for Migration. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jun 6 2016 (IPS)

Climate change is now adding new layers of complexity to the nexus between migration and the environment.

Coastal populations are at particular risk as a global rise in temperature of between 1.1 and 3.1 degrees C would increase the mean sea level by 0.36 to 0.73 meters by 2100, adversely impacting low-lying areas with submergence, flooding, erosion, and saltwater intrusion, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

But even before such catastrophes strike, the 660 to 820 million people who depend on a fishing livelihood – more so subsistence-based traditional fisher families who already find catches sharply dwindling due to over-fishing – will have no option but to abandon both home and occupation and move.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing at 11-26 million tonnes of fish each year, worth between 10 billion and 23 billion dollars, causing depletion of fish stocks, price increase and loss of livelihoods for fishermen.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) forecasts 200 million environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis. Many of them would be coastal population.

William Lacy Swing, Director General of IOM, spoke with IPS correspondent Manipadma Jena at the second UN Environmental Assembly May 23-27 in Nairobi where 174 countries focused on environmental implementation of the work that would achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are today the other drivers of coastal migration besides environmental crises and depleting fish stocks?

A: Political crises and natural disasters are the other major drivers of migration today. We have never had so many complex and protracted humanitarian emergencies now happening simultaneously from West Africa all the way to Asia, with very few spots in between which do not have some issue. We have today 40 million forcibly displaced people and 20 million refugees, the greatest number of uprooted people since the Second World War.

If we add to that climate change events like Typhoon Haiyan in Philippines, and the Haiti earthquake, there would be another additional group.

We do not know how many of these natural disasters are climate related, but increasingly we are paying attention to climate change. After the Paris talks it is more evident that we must figure in adaptation strategies, especially in places like Bangladesh and the Pacific Islands, so people can avoid and prepare for the natural disasters.

Anote Tong, president of Kiribati, was saying they were fearful they would lose some of their 33 atolls. They are already purchasing land in neighbouring Fiji for their people to migrate. This is the kind of adaptation action we need to take.

Q. How do you see the picture of global coastal migration by 2030 and subsequently by 2050? What are the approximate numbers of coastal people that are on the move today? From which countries are the maximum movements being seen?

A: Coastal migration is starting already but it is very hard to be exact as there is no good data to be able to forecast accurately. We do not know. But it is clearly going to figure heavily in the future. And it’s going to happen both in the low-lying islands in the Pacific [and] the Caribbean, and in those countries where people build houses very close to the shore and have floods every year as in Bangladesh. Also, we have to look out for places prone to earthquakes. Philippines officials were talking to me last week about preparing for a major earthquake that could happen anytime.

We have to have an adaptation policy. The more adaptation you have, the less mitigation you need. The more you prepare the less you have to lose.

Q. Are increasing incidences of conflict over depleting resources being reported within coastal communities or with other groups such as large fishing operators?

A: It is quite clear that we will have more and more conflicts over shortages of food and water that are going to be exacerbated by climate change. Certainly, if coastal stretches have been over-fished for years, there is going to be conflict.
But it may not be just conflict that occurs. In Indonesia for instance, IOM worked hard to evacuate hundreds of fishermen who had been kept for years in human slavery in the fishing industry. With the help of the Indonesian government we freed them, counseled them and got them back to normal life.

Q: Even while migration is increasingly being recognized as a critical global issue, the absence of strong policies on migration is often attributed to insufficient studies and hard data by migration experts. Has there been any improvement in this status after Syria, West Asia, East Africa migration crises?

A: IOM has undertaken several initiatives to support better policies. We just established a Global Data Analysis Centre in Berlin. We are in partnership with a number of leading agencies like Gallop World Poll, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) the research arm of The Economist Group. We are looking for other partners as we see large gaps in the data base.

While a lot of data we have is spotty, a lot of it inaccurate, we however have enough already to know which are the driving forces for migration today and in the future, including demographic drivers. We have an aging population in the industrialized countries that are in need of workers at all skill levels. And we have a very large youthful population in the global south that needs jobs.

Our forecast is that countries are going to become almost inevitably more multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-religious.
If this is going to work, economies are going to merge then it appears a pretty straightforward future scenario. But the problem is that more national migration policies are out-of-date, they have not kept up with technology. So we keep running into problems where we could in fact turn adversities into opportunities.

Q: What could be some mitigation, adaptation or preventive actions and policies affected countries should undertake? Which countries are already taking action?

A: Even if it is difficult to single out countries to mention as they are all members of IOM, Canada for instance took in 25,000 Syrian refugees earlier in the year. Several Asian countries like Thailand are providing migrants access to free public services because if this is denied you have unhealthy population living amongst you. There are other examples of proactive action being taken by countries but more is needed.

Excerpt:

A trawler in Johnstone Strait, BC, Canada. Human activities such as pollution, overfishing, mining, geo-engineering and climate change have made an international agreement to protect the high seas more critical than ever. Credit: Winky/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 20 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations will make its third – and perhaps final – attempt at reaching an agreement to launch negotiations for an international biodiversity treaty governing the high seas.

A four-day meeting of a U.N. Ad Hoc Working Group is expected to take a decision by Friday against a September 2015 deadline to begin negotiations on the proposed treaty.“The world’s international waters, or high seas, are a modern-day Wild West, with weak rules and few sheriffs.” -- Lisa Speer of NRDC

Sofia Tsenikli, senior oceans policy advisor at Greenpeace International, told IPS, “This is the last scheduled meeting where we hope to see the decision to launch negotiations materialise.”

Asked about the timeline for the final treaty itself, she said “it really depends on the issues that will come up during the negotiations.”

In a statement released Monday, the High Seas Alliance, a coalition of environmental groups, said the high seas is a vast area that makes up nearly two-thirds of the ocean and about 50 percent of the planet’s surface, and currently falls outside of any country’s national jurisdiction.

“This means it’s the largest unprotected and lawless region on Earth,” the Alliance noted.

The lack of governance on the high seas is widely accepted as one of the major factors contributing to ocean degradation from human activities.

The issues to be discussed include marine protected areas and environmental impact assessments in areas beyond national jurisdiction, as well as benefit-sharing of marine genetic resources, capacity building and transfer of marine technology.

At the same time, the growing threat from human activities, including pollution, overfishing, mining, geo-engineering, and climate change, have made an international agreement to protect these waters more critical than ever, says the High Seas Alliance.

Lisa Speer, international oceans programme director at the Natural Resources Defence Council, says “The world’s international waters, or high seas, are a modern-day Wild West, with weak rules and few sheriffs.”

Kristina M. Gjerde, senior high seas policy advisor at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told IPS U.N. member states have the historic opportunity to launch negotiations for a new global agreement to better protect, conserve and sustain the nearly 50 percent of the planet that is found beyond national boundaries.

The U.N. process, initiated at the 2012 Rio+20 summit in Brazil, has extensively explored the scope, parameters and feasibility of a possible new international instrument under the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), she added.

“It is clear that by now the vast majority of States are overwhelmingly in support,” Gjerde said.

Though some outstanding issues remain, IUCN is confident that once negotiations are launched, rapid progress can be made toward achieving an effective and equitable agreement, she added.

“With good luck, good will and good faith, negotiations, including a preparatory stage, could be accomplished in as little as two to three years,” Gjerde declared.

At the Rio+20 meeting, member states pledged to launch negotiations for the new treaty by the end of the 69th U.N. General Assembly in September 2015.

In a briefing paper released Monday, Greenpeace called on the 193-member General Assembly to take a “historic decision to develop an agreement under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond the jurisdiction of States.”

Unfortunately a few countries, including the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and Iceland, have expressed opposition to an agreement going forward. But this could change, it added.

Norway – previously unconvinced – has now become supportive and calls for the launch of a meaningful implementing agreement for biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ).

For the United States in particular, said Greenpeace, standing against progress towards a U.N. agreement that would provide the framework for establishing a global network of ocean sanctuaries would be at odds with the U.S.’s leadership on ocean issues such as the establishment of marine reserves in EEZ’s (Exclusive Economic Zones) as well as the Arctic, Antarctic and fight against illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing.

The environmental groups say there is overwhelming support for an UNCLOS implementing agreement from countries and regional country groupings across the world, from Southeast Asian nations, to African governments, European and Latin American countries and Small Island Developing States.

Among them are Australia, New Zealand, the African Union, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Group of 77 developing nations plus China, the 28-member European Union, Philippines, Brazil, South Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, Mexico, Benin, Pakistan, Uruguay, Uganda and many more.

Karen Sack, senior director of The Pew Charitable Trusts international oceans work, said the upcoming decision could signal a new era of international cooperation on the high seas.

“If countries can commit to work together on legal protections for biodiversity on the high seas, we can close existing management gaps and secure a path toward sustainable development and ecosystem recovery,” she added.

According to the environmental group, the high seas is defined as the ocean beyond any country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) – amounting to 64 percent of the ocean – and the ocean seabed that lies beyond the continental shelf of any country.

These areas make up nearly 50 percent of the surface of the Earth and include some of the most environmentally important, critically threatened and least protected ecosystems on the planet.

Only an international High Seas Biodiversity Agreement, says the coalition, would address the inadequate, highly fragmented and poorly implemented legal and institutional framework that is currently failing to protect the high seas – and therefore the entire global ocean – from the multiple threats they face in the 21st century.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Wildlife crime is not only threatening iconic species such as elephants and rhinos. But marine turtles are also a group of species under threat from criminals. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Bradnee Chambers
QUITO, Ecuador, Nov 8 2014 (IPS)

A surge in wildlife crime is fuelling criminal syndicates, perpetuating terrorism, and resulting in the loss of major revenues from tourism and industries dependent on iconic species while also endangering the livelihoods of the rural poor.

But this surge in wildlife crime is not only threatening iconic species, which include elephants, rhinos and tigers, but also lesser-known animals that are also on the brink of extinction.

Wildlife crime is estimated to be worth between seven and 23 billion dollars per year and is growing at a pace never seen in recent memory.

A great deal of attention has rightly been focused on the illegal trade of ivory from elephants and rhino horns, which has spiked out of control and is devastating these animals’ populations.

South Africa’s white rhinoceros recovered from near-extinction thanks to intense conservation efforts. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

But what the public does not know is that crime is not just limited to these species — it is also affecting many others, driving some to the brink of extinction and is depleting a wide range of economically important natural resources.

Illegal trapping results in millions of birds being indiscriminately taken every migration to supply the voracious appetite in restaurants that offer local song-bird delicacies.

The illegal charcoal trade is having a major impact on the fragile ecosystems in East Africa and threatening the habitats of birds and terrestrial mammals that depend on these ecosystems for their survival.

The scale of habitat loss is alarming and it is emerging that Al Shabaab, the Somali terrorist group responsible for the West Gate Mall attack in Nairobi in 2013, is financing its activities with proceeds of illegal charcoal sales.

Illegal fishing is the second-largest type of environmental crime, accounting for between 11 and 30 billion dollars a year. It is increasingly becoming a widespread global phenomenon that requires sustained law enforcement, stricter regulation and improved public awareness of the impacts.

The criminal activities also include illegal shark finning, which feeds crime syndicates selling the fins to markets in East Asia. Shark populations have been decimated because of the demand for the animals’ fins and oil. Estimates have shown that fins of between 26 and  73 million sharks are being traded each year, a number which is three to four times higher than overall reported shark catches worldwide.

Marine turtles are another group of species under threat from criminals. Poaching of green and hawksbill turtles, which are endangered, is still widespread in the Coral Triangle of South East Asia and in the Western Pacific Ocean. Poachers use both the shell of the turtle for raw materials for luxury goods and souvenirs, and their meat and eggs — which are considered a rare delicacy.

In Central Asia the Snow Leopard, which is highly-endangered, is still poached for its fur pelt while its primary prey, the Argali mountain goat, is also poached for its horn. As a result there is double impact on the populations of Snow Leopard to the point where there are fewer than 2,500 left in the wild.

The live capture of cheetahs remains a major threat to their already endangered populations. Sought after as pets for the rich and wealthy, many cheetahs are captured and smuggled to private collectors throughout the world. Only one in six cheetahs survives this illegal trafficking.

These are but a few examples of the other species under threat and that demonstrate the magnitude of worldwide wildlife crime.

Quito, Ecuador is hosting a major conference for more than 120 states under the Convention for the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), which will address these and other dimensions of wildlife crime that are not as readily understood globally.

Before the conference is a resolution proposed by Monaco and Ghana that is meant to broaden the fight against wildlife crime.

The resolution is also meant to bring into the spotlight other species of wildlife under threat as well as the increasing number of types of crime. These include some that take place inside countries such as markets for bushmeat and charcoal, and open bazaars that fuel the unsustainable demand for endangered species.

CMS is a convention which requires countries to either put in place conservation strategies to sustainably manage the populations or in the case of endangered species ensure there is no taking.

In this way, the Convention can be a very powerful vehicle for beefing up enforcement, increasing pressure for stronger legislation and working directly in countries to combat wildlife crime.

If adopted, the resolution will unleash the potential of this important convention to start to place international pressure on countries to address all dimensions of wildlife crime both within these countries and internationally where there animals move.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

Excerpt:

President Obama's closure of waters around three remote Pacific islands will allow Honolulu's s long-line fishing vessels like this one to continue to fish the fast-dwindling bigeye tuna. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Sep 27 2014 (IPS)

President Barack Obama this week extended the no-fishing areas around three remote pacific islands, eliciting praise from some, and disappointment from those who fear the move did not go far enough towards helping depleted species of fish recover.

Last June, Obama had proposed to end all fishing in the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of five islands, effectively doubling the surface of the world’s protected waters. But on Thursday, he only closed the three where little or no fishing goes on, making the measure, according to some experts, largely symbolic: the Wake Atoll, north of the Marshall Islands; Johnson Atoll, southwest of Hawaii; and Jarvis, just south of the Kiribati Line Islands.

Fishing of fast-diminishing species like the Pacific bigeye tuna was allowed to continue around Howland and Baker, which abut Kiribati’s 408,000 square km Phoenix Islands Protected Area, and Palmyra in the U.S. Line Islands.

“If we don’t have the fortitude to protect marine biodiversity in these easy-win situations, that says a lot about our commitment to oceans." -- Doug McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara
Many press reports said Obama had created the largest marine reserve in the world. In fact, he would have done that only if he had closed the waters around Howland and Baker. Since these waters adjoin Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands Protected Area, itself due to be closed to commercial fishing soon, the two together would have created a refuge of 850,000 square km, twice the size of California.

The biggest marine reserve in the world remains around the Indian Ocean’s Chagos Islands, which Britain closed in 2010, at 640,000 square km. Scientists say that to allow far-traveling species like tuna, shark and billfish, protected areas need to be in that range.

But after fishing fleets in Hawaii and American Samoa protested, Obama backtracked and allowed fishing to continue unabated in the two areas that have the most fish, Palmyra and Howland and Baker.

“We missed a unique opportunity to do something important for the oceans,” said Doug McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “I can’t think of anywhere in the world that could be protected and inconvenience fewer people than Palmyra and Howland and Baker.” According to official statistics, only 1.7 percent of the Samoa fleet’s catch and four percent of Honolulu’s comes from those areas.

“If we don’t have the fortitude to protect marine biodiversity in these easy-win situations, that says a lot about our commitment to oceans,” added McCauley.

On Thursday, Obama extended by about 90 percent the no-fishing zones in the waters around Jarvis, south of Palmyra and outside the range of the Hawaii fleet: Wake, which is not fished at all and lies west of Hawaii, and Johnston, south of Hawaii but far from the so-called equatorial tuna belt where the biggest numbers of fish live.

The three are more than 1,000 kilometers apart from each other and their newly protected waters add up to about one million square km.

“That’s a lot of water,” said Lance Morgan, president of the Marine Conservation institute in Seattle, who had campaigned for the closures. “Obama has protected more of the ocean than anyone else.”

Morgan pointed out that it was in his sixth year (as is Obama now) that President George W. Bush created the first large U.S. marine national monument around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and it was in the closing days of Bush’s second term that he created several others in U.S. overseas possessions, including the five in the Central Pacific.

“Podesta said Obama’s signing pen still has some ink left in it, and I hope he’ll use it,” Morgan added, referring to a remark White House Counselor John Podesta made to journalists last week.

Bush, like Obama, had also initially proposed to protect the whole EEZ of the Central Pacific islands, but after fishing companies and the U.S. Navy objected, he ended up limiting the marine national monument designation to only the areas within 90 km of the islands.

The move protected the largely pristine and unfished reefs but left the rest of the EEZ open to U.S. fishermen. This time, a source familiar with the process told IPS, the Navy had made no objections to Obama’s original proposal to close the whole EEZ of the five zones.

But Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Honolulu Western Pacific Fishery Management Advisory Board, a leading voice in Hawaii’s fishing industry, had vigorously opposed the proposed closures, telling IPS, “U.S fishermen should be able to fish in U.S. zones.”

Obama’s declaration that turns the whole EEZ (out from 90 km to 340 km) around Wake, Jarvis and Johnston into marine national monuments notes they “contain significant objects of scientific interest that are part of this highly pristine deep sea and open ocean ecosystem with unique biodiversity.”

But the declaration does not mention that overfishing in the last decades has reduced the tropical Pacific population of bigeye tuna, highly prized as sushi, to 16 percent of its original population, while the yellowfin is down to 26 percent. About 80 percent of the tuna caught by Hawaii’s long-line fleet is bigeye. The stocks of tuna are even more depleted outside the Western and Central Pacific.

“In a well-managed fishery, you would stop fishing and rebuild the stock,” said Glenn Hurry, who recently stepped down as head of the international tuna commission that manages the five-billion-dollar Pacific fishery.

The fishery’s own scientists have called for reducing the bigeye catch by 30 percent, but the catch has only grown. Honolulu’s catch of bigeye was a record last year.

“It’s too bad these areas (Palmyra and Howland and Baker) weren’t closed,” said Patrick Lehodey, a French fisheries scientist who studies Pacific tuna. Absent a reduction in catch, he said, “Our simulations showed that to help the bigeye recover, you need to close a really big area near the tuna belt.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Gerald Price sees a bleak future for Barbuda's fishermen under the Blue Halo initiative. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CODRINGTON, Barbuda, Sep 16 2014 (IPS)

Local fishermen are singing the blues over a sweeping set of new ocean management regulations, signed into law by the Barbuda Council, to zone their coastal waters, strengthen fisheries management, and establish a network of marine sanctuaries.

Director of the Barbuda Research Complex John Mussington has criticised the Blue Halo initiative, not for its laudable goals, but because he believes it needs a more inclusive approach that takes into account climate change and offers fishermen an alternative.“I have been in places where there is no management, like Jamaica where I spent several years, and I can say from firsthand experience that the fishers there are extraordinarily poor and they are poor because fishing has been so badly managed that there is nothing left to catch.” -- Dr. Nancy Knowlton

“I don’t think you are going to get the cooperation of the Barbuda fishermen,” he cautioned.

“I have been involved directly in conservation efforts in Barbuda since 1983, even more so from 1991, where every single project related to conservation of the resources, particularly related to fishing, I have been involved in, so when I speak concerning this matter I am speaking on that basis,” Mussington told IPS.

The regulations establish five marine sanctuaries, collectively protecting 33 percent (139 km2) of the coastal area, to enable fish populations to rebuild and habitats to recover.

To restore the coral reefs, catching parrotfish and sea urchins has been completely prohibited, as those herbivores are critical to keeping algae levels on reefs low so coral can thrive. Barbuda is the first Caribbean island to put either of these bold and important measures in place.

But Mussington said the regulations and the initiatives which have been signed onto are not likely to work for three reasons.

“One, the science on which the initiative is based is poor and once you have poor science to start off with you cannot expect to get good results,” he said.

“The second reason why it will be challenged has to do with the local government administration which has a track record of not adhering to regulations and a lack of will and capacity with respect to enforcing regulations.

“The third issue on which this initiative is going to likely fail has to do with the engagement of stakeholders. You cannot come into a community and basically engage stakeholders in a manner which essentially results in division and sidelining of persons. Things have not worked that way,” Mussington added.

Chair of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, Dr. Nancy Knowlton, disagrees. She cited a recent major report based on 90 different locations around the Caribbean which clearly shows that in places where fishing is properly managed, reefs are much healthier.

“In many of these places a big part of alternative livelihoods is in fact ocean-related tourism, and in order for that to take hold you need to have a healthy ecosystem, so I am much more optimistic about the chances for the Blue Halo to be a kind of flagship for the successful management of reefs in the Caribbean,” she told IPS.

“I have been in places where there is no management, like Jamaica where I spent several years, and I can say from firsthand experience that the fishers there are extraordinarily poor and they are poor because fishing has been so badly managed that there is nothing left to catch.”

The report, which synthesised a three-year study by 90 international experts and was issued by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), had a spot of surprisingly good news.

According to the authors, restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies, such as protection from overfishing and excessive coastal pollution, can help reefs recover and even make them more resilient to future climate change impacts.

The study also shows that some of the healthiest Caribbean coral reefs are those that harbour vigorous populations of grazing parrotfish.

These include the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and Bonaire, “all of which have restricted or banned fishing practices that harm parrotfish, such as fish traps and spearfishing”.

The study is urging other countries to follow suit.

Still, according to the former president of the Antigua and Barbuda Fisherman’s Cooperative, Gerald Price, the future looks “very bleak” for Barbudan fishermen under Blue Halo.

He said the last time he checked the statistics for Barbuda, there were about 43 active fishing vessels, and each one may have three to four fishermen aboard. “What are they going to do and how are they going to make a living?” Price wondered.

“Barbuda is slightly different from Antigua in that in Antigua, our fishermen usually have an alternative. They are either a carpenter or a mason or they get work at a hotel. In Barbuda, as we understand it, they are 100 percent dependent on fishing. It’s going to be bleak, very bleak.”

Creation of the new regulations on Barbuda occurred under the umbrella of the Barbuda Blue Halo Initiative, a collaboration among the Barbuda Council, Government of Antigua & Barbuda, Barbuda Fisheries Division, Codrington Lagoon Park, and the Waitt Institute. The Waitt Institute provided all of the science, mapping, and communications, offered policy recommendations, and coordinated the overall Initiative.

“I enthusiastically applaud the measures put in place in Barbuda, particularly the protection of parrotfish and sea urchins. Protection of these vitally important herbivores is the essential first step toward the recovery of Caribbean reefs from the severe degradation they have undergone in the last 50 years,” said Jeremy Jackson, director of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) at the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Also included in the regulations is a two-year fishing hiatus for Codrington Lagoon, the primary nursery ground for the lobster and finfish fisheries. The lagoon, a Ramsar wetland of international importance, is one the Caribbean’s most extensive and intact mangrove ecosystems, and home to the world’s largest breeding colony of magnificent frigate birds.

But Mussington said having the Codrington Lagoon declared as a sanctuary zone will backfire.

“The cultural significance of that lagoon, the resources which are there and the history on which it is based in terms of providing livelihood and food security for Barbudans — you would understand that making such a declaration is counterproductive,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

The move would create giant havens where fish, turtles and birds could reproduce unhindered and edge back to their natural levels. Credit: ukanda/cc by 2.0

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Aug 15 2014 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed to more than double the world’s no-fishing areas to protect what some call America’s underwater Serengeti, a series of California-sized swaths of Pacific Ocean where 1,000-pound marlin cruise by 30-foot-wide manta rays around underwater mountains filled with rare or unique species.

Obama announced in June that he wants to follow in the steps of his predecessor George W. Bush, who in 2010 ended fishing within 50 nautical miles of five islands or groups of islands south and west of Hawaii. Bush fully protected about 11 percent of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a total of 216,000 km2, by declaring them marine national monuments under the Antiquities Act, which does not require the approval of Congress.“This would be by far single greatest act of marine conservation in history.” -- Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly

Obama is expected to use the same tool to extend the ban to 200 nautical miles and protect the rest of the EEZs, or a whopping 1.8 million km2. Given that the only two other giant fully protected areas, the U.K.’s Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean and the U.S. Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, total about one million km2, Obama would more than double the no-take areas of the world’s oceans.

“This would be by far the single greatest act of marine conservation in history,” said Daniel Pauly, a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia. “It’s particularly welcome because overfishing is shrinking the populations of fish almost everywhere.”

By increasing the number of fish, the closure would boost genetic diversity, which will be increasingly valuable as marine species adapt to an ocean that is becoming warmer and more acidic at unprecedented speeds, he explained. The area is rich in sea-mounts, underwater mountains where species often evolve independently.

The move would create giant havens where fish, turtles and birds could reproduce unhindered and edge back to their natural levels. The Pacific bigeye tuna population, the most prized by sushi lovers after the vanishing bluefin, is down to a quarter of its unfished size, according to official estimates, and calls for reducing their take have been ignored.

The five roundish EEZs are called PRIAs, for Pacific Remote Island Areas. They are: Wake Atoll, north of the Marshall Islands; Johnston Atoll, southwest of Hawaii; Palmyra and Kingman Reef, in the U.S. Line Islands south of the Kiribati Line Islands; Jarvis, just below, and Howland and Baker, which abut Kiribati’s 408,000 km2-Phoenix Islands Protected Area. President Anote Tong has pledged to end all commercial fishing in the Phoenix protected area by Jan 1, 2015. The two areas together would create a single no-take zone the size of Pakistan, by far the world’s biggest.

None of the islands have resident populations. Palmyra has a scientific station with transient staff and Wake and Johnson are military, with small staffs. The others are uninhabited.

“These islands are America’s Serengeti,” said Douglas McCauley, a marine ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who once worked as an observer on a long-lining vessel based in Honolulu. “That’s where you can still find the grizzlies and the buffaloes of the sea.”

In Honolulu Monday, a public hearing recorded testimony from opponents and supporters. Though only four percent of the take of the Hawaii fleet in 2012 came from PRIAs, criticism from fishermen ran strong. A local television station headlined its story, “It’s designed to protect the environment, but could it put local fishermen out of business?”

Opposition was led by the Western Pacific Fisheries Advisory Council, known as Wespac and controlled by the local fishing industry. Wespac issued a report citing the “best available scientific information” that asserted the closure was unnecessary because, it claimed, the fisheries in the five areas, which are open only to U.S. vessels, were healthy and sustainable.

Like many academics, McCauley, the ecologist, disagreed. He pointed to official statistics that show the Pacific tuna, the world’s most valuable fishery, are becoming smaller and fewer, the result of the same kind of overfishing that pummeled populations in the other tropical oceans.

John Hampton, the Central and Western Pacific fishery’s chief scientist, analyses whole stocks – in this case Pacific populations of skipjack, bigeye, albacore and yellowfin, along with billfish like marlin and swordfish. He said closing even such large areas won’t help because the fish move around the entire ocean.

But studies have shown that varying percentages of tuna are actually quite sedentary and stay inside PRIA-sized areas; most Hawaii yellowfin, for instance, stay within a few hundred miles of the islands.

McCauley pointed to statistics collected by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service that show that the number of fish caught per 1,000 hooks by long-line vessels is higher in the PRIAs than in non-U.S. waters. For skipjack and albacore tuna, the ratio is two to one, and for yellowfin it’s six to one.

“This indicates that there’s already more fish inside the PRIAs, which illustrates that if you fish less, the population increases,” he said.

Alan Friedlander, a marine ecologist at the University of Hawaii, said even seabirds, the category of birds undergoing the steepest decline, would benefit from a ban on fishing.

Many species depend on tuna and other predators that feed on schools of small fish by driving them to the surface, where the birds can pick them off. “If you have more tuna, there’s going to be more prey fish driven to the surface and that will help the sea birds,” Friedlander said.

McCauley agreed and noted that historically, efforts to prevent the complete collapse of overfished species had focused on the species themselves.” “But by closing giant areas like these, you allow the ecosystem to become whole again,” he said.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

Raolo Island in the Solomon Islands is one of the many places threatened by sea level rise. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 11 2014 (IPS)

The world’s 52 small island developing states (SIDS), some in danger of being wiped off the face of the earth because of sea-level rise triggered by climate change, will be the focus of an international conference in the South Pacific island nation of Samoa next month.

Scheduled to take place Sep. 1-2, the conference will provide world leaders with “a first-hand opportunity to experience climate change and poverty challenges of small islands.”For low-lying atoll nations particularly, the high ratio of coastal area to land mass will make adaptation to climate change a significant challenge.

According to the United Nations, the political leaders are expected to announce “over 200 concrete partnerships” to lift small islanders out of poverty – all of whom are facing rising sea levels, overfishing, and destructive natural events like typhoons and tsunamis.

“We are working with our partners – bilaterally and multilaterally – to help resolve our problems,” said Ambassador Ali’ioaiga Feturi Elisaia, permanent representative of Samoa to the United Nations.

“You don’t have to bring the cheque book to the [negotiating] table,” he added. “It’s partnerships that matter.”

The issues on the conference agenda include sustainable economic development, oceans, food security and waste management, sustainable tourism, disaster risk reduction, health and non-communicable diseases, youth and women.

The list of 52 SIDS covers a wide geographical area and includes Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Nauru, Palau, Maldives, Cuba, Marshall Islands, Suriname, Timor-Leste, Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The conference is expected to adopt a plan of action, also called an outcome document, ensuring some of the priorities for SIDS. A preparatory committee, co-chaired by New Zealand and Singapore, has finalised the outcome document which will go before the conference for approval.

Responding to a series of questions, Ambassador Karen Tan, permanent representative of Singapore to the United Nations, and Phillip Taula, deputy permanent representative of New Zealand, told IPS SIDS have “specific vulnerabilities, and the difficulties they face are severe and complex. The small size of SIDS creates disadvantages.”

These can include limited resources and high population density, which can contribute to overuse and depletion of resources; high dependence on international trade; threatened supply of fresh water; costly public administration and infrastructure; limited institutional capacities; and limited export volumes, which are too small to achieve economies of scale.

They noted that geographic dispersion and isolation from markets can also lead to high freight costs and reduced competitiveness. SIDS have limited land areas and populations concentrated in coastal zones. Climate change and sea-level rise present significant risks.

The long-term effects of climate change may threaten the very existence and viability of some SIDS, Tan and Taula said in the joint interview. “SIDS are located among the most vulnerable regions in the world in terms of the intensity and frequency of natural and environmental disasters and their increasing impact. And they face disproportionately high economic, social and environmental consequences when disasters occur.”

These vulnerabilities accentuate other issues facing developing countries in general, such as challenges around trade liberalisation and globalisation, food security, energy dependence and access; freshwater resources; land degradation, waste management, and biodiversity.

Asked how many SIDS have been identified by the U.N. as in danger of being wiped off the face of the earth, they said no such assessment has yet been undertaken.

However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its fifth assessment report (AR5), and its Working Group II has recently issued its contribution to that, on ‘Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability’.

The report warned that small islands in general are at risk of loss of livelihoods, coastal settlements, infrastructure, ecosystem services, and economic stability.

For low-lying atoll nations particularly, the high ratio of coastal area to land mass will make adaptation to climate change a significant challenge.

Some small island states are expected to face severe impacts such as submergence, coastal flooding, and coastal erosion, the report added. These could have damage and adaptation costs of several percentage points of gross domestic product (GDP).

The report notes the risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones in small islands.

However, the WGII report also notes that significant potential exists for adaptation in islands, but additional external resources and technologies will enhance response.

Asked if there will be a plan of action adopted in Samoa, they said the outcome document will highlight the challenges that SIDS face and actions that SIDS and their partners will take to address these challenges.

“The theme of the conference, sustainable development of SIDS through genuine and durable partnerships, recognises that international cooperation and a wide range of partnerships involving all stakeholders are critical for the sustainable development of SIDS.”

As host, Samoa has made it clear that “no partnership is too small to count but what is essential is that they have clear targets, outputs, planned outcomes and timelines.”

Meanwhile, Afu Billy, capacity building volunteer at Development Services Exchange in Solomon Islands, told IPS the experiences that would be shared during the conference will be invaluable for small island states as they learn from each other how they are dealing with these issues and also learn from the international community on how they too are addressing these priorities of SIDS.

The fact that the conference will be bringing together governments and non-government stakeholders, including the private sector, provides a learning opportunity and one that will pose collaborative efforts on how everyone can work together in partnership to assist SIDS.

The conference will also create a space for civil society organisations (CSOs) to have an independent voice and also for governments to hear their views, she noted.

This may create further collaborative initiatives between governments and CSOs for sustainable developments in the SIDS.

Asked whether she expects any concrete outcome, Billy said the idea to form partnerships among all stakeholders including the governments to assist SIDS to do things for themselves “is one outcome that we anticipate the conference delivering.”

Any plan of action that the conference adopts should be inclusive of all stakeholders, she added.

“There should be emphasis on SIDS doing things for themselves to ensure sustainable development and that stakeholders and partners are seen as ‘friends’ who come to their rescue when they get bogged in a ‘rut’ but then let’s them carry on with what they are doing after being ‘rescued'”.

This is to alleviate or minimise donor dependency but also promote sustainable development.

“We expect better and stronger official development assistance (ODA) to be directed on development effectiveness rather than on a dominant aid effectiveness approach,” she said.

“Finally, we expect that the issue of reducing corruption and increase transparency at all levels will be an overarching subject at the Conference and sound recommendations to alleviate corruption will be adopted and incorporated into the Plan of Action,.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

Purse-seiners have been unsustainably fishing the bigeye tuna in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, May 9 2014 (IPS)

After years of claiming untruthfully that the world’s most fished marine protected area was “off limits to fishing and other extractive uses,” President Anote Tong of the Pacific island state of Kiribati and his cabinet have voted to close it to all commercial fishing by the end of the year.

The action, if implemented, would allow populations of tuna and other fish depleted by excessive fishing to return to natural levels in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), a patch of ocean the size of California studded with pristine, uninhabited atolls.The move comes at a time global fish populations are steadily declining as increasingly efficient vessels are able to extract them wholesale from ever-more-remote and deep waters around the globe.

While no-take zones of comparative size exist in Hawaii, the Chagos Islands and the Coral Sea, none are as rich in marine life, making this potentially the most effective marine reserve in the world.

The news drew high praise from scientists and environmentalists.

“This is a big win for conservation and long overdue,” said Bill Raynor, ‎director of the Indo-Pacific Division of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organisation. “Now I hope that the other Pacific countries that are contemplating giant marine reserves will follow PIPA’s example.”

These include Palau, where President Tommy Remengesau has suggested closing off its entire Exclusive Economic Zone to commercial fishing, as well as the Cook Islands and New Caledonia, which are studying how much fishing to allow on protected areas even larger than the Phoenix.

“This is fantastic news,” said Lagi Toribau of Greenpeace. “The area will provide a crucial sanctuary for the region’s marine life from highly migratory tunas and turtles to reef fishes and sharks.”

The move comes at a time global fish populations are steadily declining as increasingly efficient vessels are able to extract them wholesale from ever-more-remote and deep waters around the globe.

The international fleets of industrial purse-seiners, dominated by Spanish, Asian and U.S.companies, have converged on the Western and Central Pacific since the start of the millennium after depleting the stocks elsewhere.

The result has been a fast and unsustainable decline of the bigeye, the most prized for sushi after the fast-disappearing bluefin, and more moderate shrinking of the yellowfin and skipjack populations. The fishery’s own scientists have called for a reduction of the catch by 30 percent, but instead it has increased by that amount.

In contrast, for years, Tong’s Wikipedia page has stated, “In 2008, his government declared 150,000 square miles (390,000 km2) “of [the] Phoenix Islands marine area a fully protected marine park, making it off limits to fishing and other extractive uses.”

In a speech still he gave at the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit two years ago still visible on Youtube, Tong mentions “the initiative of my country in closing off 400,000 square kilometres of our [waters] from commercial fishing activities,” calling it “our contribution to global ocean conservation efforts.”

In fact, when PIPA was created, only in the three percent of the reserve that’s around the islands, where virtually no fishing was going on, was it banned. In the rest of the reserve, the catch increased, reaching 50,000 tonnes in 2012 – an unheard-of amount in any protected area.

In an interview in Tarawa, the capital island, a year ago, Tong had brushed aside objections and said he had no intention of ending fishing in the reserve entirely anytime soon. The management plan called for closing another 25 percent next year if Kiribati’s Western partner, the Washington-based Conservation International, donated 8.5 million dollars into PIPA’s trust fund.

The money would be to compensate Kiribati for losses in income from fishing licenses stemming from closure – losses many experts said were entirely imaginary, as PIPA makes up only 11 percent of Kiribati’s waters and the fishing vessels could easily catch the far-traveling tuna elsewhere, they said.

But following reports in the international media, including IPS, on the contrast between Tong’s claims and reality, he said in a press release last September that closing the reserve to all fishing, far from entailing sacrifice as he had previously insisted, would make good business sense for his people.

Ashley McCrea-Strub, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, argues that a complete closure “would create both capital and interest.” She explained that the much-reduced tuna, billfish and sharks populations would likely double inside the reserve to reach their natural, original levels within a couple of decades: that’s the capital.

“PIPA is big enough that some of the tuna will spend all their lives inside it, so they’ll be able to reproduce freely,” she said. “Once the density gets high, more fishes are going to start venturing outside the reserve in search of food and can be caught outside the border,” she said. “That’s the interest.”

Though PIPA is the signature project for Kiribati’s two foreign partners, Conservation International (on whose board Tong sits) and the New England Aquarium, neither organisation has made any announcement. The news came in a short, anonymous paragraph posted on PIPA’s website reporting that the cabinet on Jan. 29 voted to close the reserve to all commercial fishing by the end of the year.

An Internet search found that One Fiji television station’s website ran a story on the vote on Feb. 27, quoting Kiribati Radio (which lacks a website). Fiji One said the measure was taken “as a commitment towards protecting and conserving its marine resources as well as a bid to attract donors to invest in the PIPA Trust Fund,” which has five million dollars.

Asked why there had been no public announcement for what marine scientists said was the most far-reaching marine closure in years if enforced, Gregory Stone, who first suggested creating the reserve and is now a vice president at both Conservation International and the New England Aquarium, did not respond to several e-mailed requests for comment.

The fisheries sector in the CARICOM Region is an important source of food and income. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CODRINGTON, Barbuda, Apr 26 2014 (IPS)

A marine biologist has cautioned that the mass deaths of starfish along the United States west coast in recent months could also occur in the Caribbean region because of climate change, threatening the vital fishing sector.

Since June 2013, scientists began noticing that starfish, which they say function as keystone species in the marine ecosystem, have been mysteriously dying by the millions."It’s a fight that the world has to win if it is to survive because if the small states don’t win, it means that the globe as a whole does not win." -- John Mussington

“The cause of the starfish die-off which is taking place in the Pacific Ocean is not known at this time but it could turn out to be from a number of factors including climate change,” John Mussington told IPS.

“If it turns out that climate change factors such as ocean warming are indeed implicated in the starfish die-off, then there is the possibility that the same thing could happen in the Atlantic and affect Caribbean species.

“We are living in an era when the predicted consequences of climate change are now reality. Large scale die-off of can therefore happen to us in the Caribbean,” Mussington added.

Starfish play a key role in marine ecosystems. They eat mussels, barnacles, snails, mollusks and other smaller sea life so their health is considered a measure of marine life on the whole in a given area. Starfish are in turn eaten by shorebirds, gulls, and sometimes sea otters.

Mussington explained that something similar to what’s happening in California has happened in the region before.

He told IPS that in 1983 there was a Caribbean-wide die-off of the black sea urchin, spreading from as far north as The Bahamas right down the chain of islands to the south.

“The long-spined sea urchin was a kestone species in the Caribbean marine ecosystem, similar to the affected starfish in the Pacific-California ecosystem. The designation as ‘keystone’ is due to the fact that if there is anything affecting their large populations, then this can be interpreted as a reliable indication of problems in the entire ecosystem that will likely affect other species,” Mussington said.

“Something went very wrong with our Caribbean marine ecosystem in 1983 and the black sea urchin was wiped out – the species is considered today to be functionally extinct. With the decline of this keystone species, the Caribbean has seen significant decline in its coral reefs and the marine communities they support, including economically important commercial species.”

Mussington said the spiny urchin grazes on algae and it is important to control the number of algae on coral reefs.

Habitat degradation, specifically of coral reefs, has been cited by numerous studies as the primary cause of ongoing fish declines of Caribbean fish populations.

An Arapaima, the world’s largest freshwater fish, being kept in a man-made pond in Guyana. The Arapaima can weigh over 800 pounds and reach lengths of up to 10 feet. Unfortunately, they’ve been overfished commercially and are currently a threatened species. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Caribbean coral reefs have experienced drastic losses in the past several decades. Fish use the structure of corals for shelter and they also contribute to coastal protection.

Established research has predicted that the communities located in coastal areas, as well as national economies in the general Caribbean region, are likely to sustain substantial economic losses should the current trends in coral reef degradation and destruction continue.

It has been estimated that fisheries associated with coral reef in the Caribbean region are responsible for generating net annual revenues, which have been valued at or above approximately 837 million Eastern Caribbean dollars, or about 310 million U.S. dollars.

Continued degradation of the region’s few remaining coral reefs would diminish these net annual revenues by an estimated 95-140 million U.S. dollars annually by 2015. The subsequent decrease in dive tourism could also profoundly affect annual net tourism revenues

“There has to be some balance and once you have a major species dying off, it’s going to have repercussions for the entire system. We must not forget that man is a integral part of this system and the repercussions for us will be serious,” Mussington told IPS.

The fisheries sector in the CARICOM Region is an important source of livelihoods and sustenance. The local population is highly dependent on this resource for economic and social development. This resource also contributes significantly to food security, poverty alleviation, employment, foreign exchange earnings, development and stability of rural and coastal communities, culture, recreation and tourism.

The subsector provides direct employment for more than 120,000 fishers and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of others – particularly women – in processing, marketing, boat-building, net-making and other support services.

But the coordinator for the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Caribbean Regional Coordinating Unit-Caribbean Environment Programme, Nelson Andrade Colmenares, told IPS the vital sector is being threatened by climate change.

“The Caribbean Sea, home to a vibrant ecosystem benefitting fisherfolk, the tourism industry and the region’s people alike is currently threatened,” he said, adding that “over harvesting of fisheries, climate change and pollution from sewage, agricultural runoff and industrial effluent has led to 75 percent of coral reefs in the region being labeled as at risk.”

Acting permanent secretary in Dominica’s fisheries ministry, Harold Guiste agrees, explaining that the future of the Caribbean’s conch and lobster fisheries remains under threat despite regional efforts to protect it.

Guiste blames the problem of overfishing squarely on nations outside the Caribbean that trawl the region’s seas illegally.

“Globally we have noticed a rush to fish accompanied by a lack of responsible behaviour in the fishing sector,” he told IPS. “This type of hooligan behaviour has resulted in severe decline in some major fisheries of the world and collapse in some others.”

The Dominican official called for a collaborative approach to safeguard against the depletion of the region’s already challenged resources.

The spiny lobster trade brings in about 456 million US dollars to CARICOM nations but demand has led to overfishing of a once healthy stocks.

While admitting that “some factors are out of our control as it relates to mitigating against global warming”, Mussington said both developing and developed countries need to do more.

“We need to do things which will discontinue the rise in global temperatures and those things that need to happen have to do with less use of fossil fuels and modification of certain things that countries do,” he told IPS.

In fact, the persons who are going to be suffering most – the people living in these Small Island Developing States – we are not the ones ultimately responsible in large measure for the problems we are having now, the developed countries are.”

“So far the developed countries have been very resistant to implementing those policies and changes that need to happen,” Mussington added.

In the end, he said the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) negotiations should not be simply about the smaller countries winning.

“It’s a fight that the world has to win if it is to survive because if the small states don’t win, it means that the globe as a whole does not win, which means that Planet Earth will lose out and the human race on planet earth might very well face total extinction,” warned Mussington.

“That’s what’s facing us. The globe will become unlivable,” he added.

Yellow fish swarm Australia's Ningaloo reef. Around 80 percent of the world's fisheries are fully exploited, over exploited or significantly depleted. Credit: Angelo DeSantis/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 3 2014 (IPS)

At a political level, when the United Nations speaks of a “high seas alliance”, it is probably a coalition of countries battling modern piracy in the Indian Ocean.

But at the environmental level, the High Seas Alliance (HSA) is a partnership of more than 27 non-governmental organisations (NGOs), plus the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), fighting for the preservation of marine biodiversity.

As a U.N. working group discusses a proposed “international mechanism” for the protection of oceans, the HSA says high seas and the international seabed area, which make up about 45 percent of the surface of the planet, “are brimming with biodiveristy and vital resources.”

But they are under increasing pressure from threats such as overfishing, habitat destruction and the impacts of climate change.

The HSA has expressed its strong support for negotiations to develop a new agreement to establish a legal regime to safeguard biodiversity in the high seas.

Any such treaty or convention will be a new implementing agreement under the 1994 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

The Working Group, which is expected to conclude its four-day meeting Friday, says it is at a critical juncture of its work, and discussions are expected to continue into the future.

“The next three meetings present a clear opportunity to try and overcome remaining differences and to crystallise the areas of convergence into concrete action,” U.N. Legal Counsel Miguel de Serpa Soares said in his opening remarks Monday.

Sofia Tsenikli, senior advisor on Oceans Policy at Greenpeace International, told IPS, “Our oceans are in peril and in need of urgent protection.”

Faced with multiple threats, including climate change, ocean acidification and overfishing, the oceans can only provide livelihoods in the future if governments establish a global network of ocean sanctuaries today, she added.

“It’s simply scandalous that still less than one percent of the high seas is protected,” Tsenikli said.

She said governments must listen to the call by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and act urgently to protect marine life in the oceans by setting up a U.N. high seas biodiversity agreement.

On Monday, Ban said, “If we are to fully benefit from the oceans, we must reverse the degradation of the marine environment due to pollution, overexploitation and acidification.”

He urged all nations to work towards that end, including by joining and implementing the existing UNCLOS.

As of last year, 165 of the 193 member states have joined UNCLOS.

Friedrich Wulf, international biodiversity campaigner at Friends of the Earth (FoE) Europe, told IPS, “I can say the open sea is an area of dispute and is a major obstacle for designating the 40 percent protected areas target” – called for by the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) – “and that this area is not feasible under this convention.”

“The issue has now been moved to the rather old UNCLOS but was quite heavily debated and I am not sure UNCLOS covers it well,” he said.

“So I think a new effort to have a U.N. regulation is very helpful. I don’t think it will be possible to reach Aichi target 6 on marine biodiversity without it, as there is a legislative gap in the open sea,” he added.

Aichi targets were adopted at a conference in Aichi, Japan, back in 2010.

Target 6 reads: By 2020, all fish and invertebrate stocks and aquatic plants are managed and harvested sustainably, legally and applying ecosystem based approaches, so that overfishing is avoided, recovery plans and measures are in place for all depleted species, fisheries have no significant adverse impacts on threatened species and vulnerable ecosystems and the impacts of fisheries on stocks, species and ecosystems are within safe ecological limits.

At the June 2012 Rio+20 conference on the environment in Brazil, member states made a commitment to address the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction on an urgent basis.

“Healthy, productive and resilient oceans, rich in marine biodiversity, have a significant role to play in sustainable development as they contribute to the health, food security and livelihoods of millions of people around the world,” the meeting concluded.

The Working Group says it will present its recommendations on the scope, parametres and feasibility of the instrument to the General Assembly to enable it to make a decision before the end of its 69th session, in September 2015.

The meetings are being co-chaired by the Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, Ambassador Palitha T. B. Kohona, and the Legal Adviser of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, Liesbeth Lijnzaad.

Disoriented by land illuminations, landward straying Olive Ridley turtle hatchlings are collected by the community and released safely into the sea. Credit: Bivash Pandav/IPS.

By Manipadma Jena
GANJAM, India, Mar 27 2014 (IPS)

When Olive Ridley sea turtles nest on the beach in his village, little Warthy Raju can barely wait for the millions of hatchlings, with their three-inch shells and thumb-sized heads, to scramble out.

Instead of heading for the sea, many disoriented baby turtles move landwards. Raju, all of 12 years old, plays knight in shining armour, snatching them away from the clutches of death in bucketfuls – at least 30 buckets each day – and gently pours them into the receding waves.

Despite cheek-by-jowl proximity with over 6,000 people in three fishing villages, the 4.5-kilometre-long Rushikulya river mouth rookery in eastern India’s Odisha state has become a steady favourite of the nesting Ridley.Despite their own livelihoods being at stake, local communities still favour turtle conservation.

Rushikulya hosted about 300,000 of the total 694,000 Olive Ridley turtles that nested in Odisha in 2013. In February this year, though nesting unexpectedly halted after just two days, 25,000 turtles nested here and none at the other two rookeries in the state.

Community conservation efforts are being credited for the increasing mass nesting at Rushikulya.

“Community presence, instead of becoming a major deterrent, has emerged as the Ridley’s strongest support over the last 10 years,” Mangaraj Panda of the United Artists’ Association, which is involved in community conservation efforts, told IPS.

India’s eastern coastal state of Odisha each year hosts nearly half of the world’s and 90 percent of India’s nesting Olive Ridley turtles, categorised as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The only other major mass nesting beaches in the world are in Pacific Mexico and Costa Rica.

In Odisha, the Ridley nests in three major groups off the Indian Ocean – on the Rushikulya, Gahirmatha and Devi coasts. The last two are inside protected wildlife sanctuaries.

“By November, our men sight turtles congregating five kilometres offshore. By peak winter, pregnant females approach closer. We know it’s time to clean their nesting site,” 45-year-old Pari Behera, a fisherwoman, told IPS in Purunabandh village.

Rushikulya’s fisherwomen’s collectives lead turtle conservation efforts. With the help of local school students, they clear the site of discarded fishnets, glass, hard plastic pieces, branches and polythene bags.

Over six nights in mid-February, thousands of the reptilians, two feet long, weighing 50 kg, crowd ashore to dig their earthen-pot shaped nests, laying 110 to 180 eggs each.

Mesh nettings are embedded along 2.3 km to protect the hatchlings from straying landward as they are disoriented by illumination.

“Round-the-clock vigil inside the barricade keeps wild dogs, cats, hyenas and jackals from digging up eggs,” said 27-year-old Madu Shankar Rao in Gokharakuda village. Volunteers of the international non-profit World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and forest guards help.

The IUCN indicates a globally declining population trend for the Olive Ridley due to trawl fishing, destruction of habitat and global warming. However, India’s environment and forests ministry reports no such decline.

Nesting numbers in Odisha have in fact been rising over the last 10 years, according to an extensive 2013 survey by WWF. Nesting surged from 35,000 in 2002 to 460,000 in 2006, and to its highest ever at 720,000 in 2011.

Since 2004, the Odisha government’s annual fishing ban from November to May to protect the Olive Ridley has reduced their incidental mortality by half. This ban is for traditional fishermen as well as trawlers.

But threats persist.

“Even today, late in the night, the sea in the no-fishing zone looks like a mini township; trawlers are on business as usual,” Panda said.

Bivash Pandav, acknowledged as a global authority on Odisha’s Olive Ridley and a senior researcher at the Wildlife Institute of India, the environment ministry’s key conservation advisory institute, told IPS: “That Rushikulya hosts an extremely large number of turtles does not mean all is well here.”

Discontent has been simmering among fishermen ever since the seven-month ban was imposed.

“This remains a most tangled issue confronting fishermen and the state fisheries administration,” a key fisheries official told IPS, requesting anonymity. In early January, coastguards shot dead a fisherman who was flouting the ban.

In Podampeta, the richest of rookery villages, fisherman Babaji Ramaya told IPS, “Our kitchen fires don’t burn if we do not go fishing. The sea is our farmland and the fish our grain; what will our children eat?”

Podampeta’s brick houses sport bright glazed tile exteriors. Young fishermen flaunt smart phones. “Without an equivalent income, how can we give up fishing?” asked Ramaya.

Fishing families have up to three men each earning 200 dollars a month. Women earn 100 dollars preparing and selling dried fish.

While they have traditionally used wooden boats and nets that do not harm the turtles, with fierce competition from trawlers and a growing fishing population, they are increasingly switching to motor boats with propellers and advanced fishing gear. Besides, many do not observe the ban.

“All we request them to do is not use nets for 15 days annually – when gravid females come near the shore, nest and depart, and again when millions of hatchlings are outbound,” said Michael Peters, who heads WWF-Odisha.

Many admit that traditional methods of fishing do not harm the Olive Ridley. “The fishing ban should explicitly be for trawling, mechanised gill netting and long lining,” Pandav told IPS.

Despite their own livelihoods being at stake, local communities still favour turtle conservation.

“Proper resource mobilisation can make Rushikulya an ideal community reserve in India,” Pandav said, reiterating a decade-old community demand.

Community reserves, corresponding to IUCN’s Category VI protected areas, are granted when wildlife habitats are in private hands, making closed area protection unfeasible. It’s the community that administers the ecology and sustains livelihoods.

The Odisha government has tentatively explored the area’s ecotourism potential, webcasting Rushikulya’s nesting this year. But conservationists believe this could pose another threat.

“Bottom trawlers, unplanned beach development, including ports, lighting from coastal and defence infrastructure, erosion-control casuarina plantations and tourism can become major hurdles to turtle safe nesting,” Pandav cautioned.

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 11 2013 (IPS)

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is convinced there is sufficient global capacity to produce enough food to adequately feed the world’s seven billion people.

Dr. Palitha Kohona. UN Photo/Mark Garten

But despite progress made over the last two decades, says FAO, some 870 million people still suffer from chronic hunger.

What if the earth’s finite agricultural resources run out as a result of drought, desertification, climate change and natural disasters?

There is always the high seas and ocean floors, says Ambassador Palitha Kohona, who co-chairs a U.N. Working Group on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity Beyond Areas of National Jurisdiction.

The seas and oceans, which cover 70 percent of the planet, are probably the last frontier on earth with vast areas still to be explored and life forms still to be discovered, he told IPS. And 65 percent of the oceans are beyond national jurisdiction, he added.

The mandate of the Working Group, co-chaired by the Legal Adviser to the Netherlands, covers the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction, and includes genetic resources, said Dr Kohona, who is also Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and former chief of the U.N. Treaty Section.

In an interview with IPS, he said, “We have a better knowledge of outer space than of the oceans which provide sustenance to over a billion people, mostly in developing countries.”

But global fisheries are under serious threat of collapsing mainly due to industrialised fishing."We have a better knowledge of outer space than of the oceans, which provide sustenance to over a billion people." -- Dr. Palitha Kohona

For example, he said, stocks of cod, southern blue fin tuna and orange roughy are down to critical levels. And coral reefs are affected by ocean warming and acidification.

“Climate change will further negatively impact on life forms in the oceans,” Kohona said.

The new frontier opening up in the oceans is bio-prospecting and bio-harvesting, he added.

“It is now firmly believed that many new pharmaceuticals and other products can be developed from the genetic material available in the seas, especially in the deep seas, on the sea bed and in the sub surface of the sea bed,” Kohona noted.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How far have we gone in exploiting these rich resources?

A: So far, only a handful of advanced countries possess the vessels capable of harvesting genetic material, especially from deep sea trenches and hydrothermal vents.

Even less have the ability to conduct research and analysis on this material and basic research is mainly funded by industrialised states.

Developing countries argue that the benefits arising from developments made from material obtained from areas beyond national jurisdiction should be shared equitably through a global convention since the source of this material was probably in the area recognised as the common heritage of mankind.

Q: What are the primary objectives of your Working Group?

A: The Working Group is required to make recommendations to the General Assembly with a view to ensuring that a future legal framework will address the complex issues raised.

In fact, it is the expectation of many delegations that a legal instrument will result from these discussions.

Q: In its report last month, the High Level Panel of Eminent Persons predicted that extreme hunger — and poverty — could be eradicated by 2030? If so, what role can the high seas and oceans play in alleviating the world’s food crisis?

A: With extreme hunger, globally a billion people go to sleep every night without eating dinner, and extreme poverty, 1.2 billion people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day, our resources need to be more efficiently and equitably distributed.

Nearly 30 percent of available food goes to waste in developed countries due to wasteful consumption patterns. Global fisheries employ and provide nutrition to, including proteins, over a billion people.

It is a worrying reality that 70 percent of fish stocks are in serious risk of collapsing due to over fishing. If fish stocks collapse, the consequences will be disastrous.

In addition, the warming and increasing acidification of the oceans, rising sea levels, and coral bleaching will affect fish stocks and other life forms in the seas, in some cases pushing stocks to new habitats, especially tropical fish stocks.

While we focus on protecting whales, which we must also do, economically relevant stocks are reaching extinction point. It is imperative that we properly manage, conserve and sustainably use what is an essential but rapidly diminishing resource.

Q: What progress has been achieved in the negotiations on marine biological diversity beyond national jurisdiction?

A: Progress has been slow. While developing countries have been actively advocating the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from research into genetic material derived from areas beyond national jurisdiction, the sharing of information and technology and capacity building, the countries that conduct the research are reluctant to concede these readily.

They argue that it costs over one billion dollars to develop and bring a single new product to the market. Many products never reach the market despite the millions spent to develop them.

In the meantime, 4,000 marine organisms have been identified in relation to 40,000 new patents filed. Sometimes it is difficult to determine the actual origin of such material. But I believe an equitable formula for benefit sharing can be developed.

Q: How interested are member states in exploiting marine resources?

A: The major maritime countries, including the United States, Japan, Russia, member states of the European Union, India, Argentina, Brazil and over 120 other states participated in the discussions, along with civil society and academics. Our next sessions will take place at the United Nations, Aug. 19 to 23 this year.

Excerpt:

Despite providing food for the country, fisher families are among the poorest in the Philippines. Credit: Kara Santos/IPS

By Kara Santos
MANILA, May 9 2013 (IPS)

Minda Moriles, 56, has worked at sea most of her life. A resident in a coastal community in the city of Las Pinas, part of the Philippines’ National Capital Region, her earnings are dictated by what she can catch off the shores of Manila Bay.

“Life is really difficult for us,” Moriles tells IPS, referring to her family of seven. “My husband heads out at three in the morning and comes back at three in the afternoon. But we try our best to feed our family and send some (of the children) to school.”

In between taking care of the children and seeing to all the household duties, Moriles says she often accompanies her husband out to sea, hoping that the catch will be better with two.

Together, they bring in a daily income of about 200 pesos (four dollars), less than half of the minimum wage. Much of this money goes towards purchasing gasoline for a borrowed boat, which guzzles about 1.22 dollars worth of fuel a day, leaving three dollars for the family’s daily expenses.

By comparison, a recent study by the Worker’s Party, a labour rights group, estimated that an average family of six needs a daily income of about 29 dollars to survive.

It is not uncommon for fisherfolk to have large families like Moriles’s. While official figures from the 2011 Family Health Survey (FHS) peg average family size at about 3.6 children for rural areas and 2.7 children for urban areas, the average fisherfolk family size is six, with some couples having as many as 12 to 14 children.

As well as being among the largest, fisher families are also some of the poorest in the country: the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) estimates a poverty incidence of 41.4 percent for the fishing sector, way above the national average of 26.5 percent.

Poverty is highest in southern rural areas like Caraga, Region VII (also known as Central Visayas) and the Bicol Region.

Moriles says impoverished fisherfolk are in desperate need of government assistance, especially in times of calamity, as well as rice subsidies to help feed their families.

A group of concerned fishers recently opened a dialogue with the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to demand financial support to augment their income.

One of the many grievances brought to the government agency was the issue of overfishing, which Pablo Rosales, spokesperson of ‘Pangisda Philippines’, a member of the Save the Fisheries Now Network, says is exacerbating poverty among fisher communities.

“Ten out of the 13 major fishing grounds in the Philippines are heavily exploited,” Rosales told IPS on the sidelines of the dialogue, citing figures from the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR).

With over 43,000 inhabitants per square kilometre, Manila is the most densely populated city in the world. Over 25 million people live along its coast and many depend on the sea for survival. The presence of over 70 fishermen per square kilometre has turned the Manila Bay into the most heavily exploited fishing ground in the country.

While the daily catch is dependent on the weather and sea conditions, Rosales says each fisherman harvests an average of three to five kilos of fish on a good day, which sell in the market for 30 to 70 pesos per kilo.

“This amounts to earnings of 150 to 350 pesos (between three and eight dollars) a day,” he says.”

Fisherfolk make between 30 and 70 pesos per kilo of fish in the local market. Credit: Kara Santos/IPS

Species like ‘hasa-hasa’ (short bodied mackerel) and ‘galunggong’ (red-tail scad) are indispensable to the local diet, with Filipinos consuming a daily average of 98.6 grammes of fish. A simple meal consists of salted or fried fish, with rice and vegetables.

But while fish are a staple food here, the lives of fishermen are anything but predictable.

“We need to spend money to (get out to sea) but when we cast our nets…there is no certainty that we will be able to catch anything that day, especially in areas where natural resources are being depleted,” according to Rosales.

Disappearing habitats

Fishermen are now demanding that overfished areas be rehabilitated, since fewer fish mean lower incomes.
But according to Dennis Calvan, executive director of Fisheries Reform, a local non-governmental organisation, overfishing is just the tip of the iceberg.

“Fish habitats like coral reefs, mangroves and sea-grass (beds) are already in critical condition,” Calvan told IPS.

A briefer prepared by the Save the Fisheries Now Network states that over 70 percent of coral reefs are in a state of degradation; less than one-third of the country’s 450,000 hectares of mangroves remain; and an estimated half of all sea-grass beds have been lost or severely degraded during the past 50 years.

In their dialogue with the welfare department, Calvan and other fisher folk asked the government to develop a poverty alleviation programme specifically targeting the poorest of the poor, including a “roadmap to recovery” for the Philippines’ oceans.

According to Calvan, the roadmap should contain “plans on how to improve income from fishing, rehabilitate important fishery habitats, protect and improve the remaining coral reefs through the establishment of Marine Protected ares and reforest mangrove areas.”

The alliance of fisherfolk is already conducting coastal cleanups and mangrove reforestation in an effort to rehabilitate the natural resources they rely on for their livelihood.

The activist alliance ‘Pamalakaya’ has been pushing for mangrove reforestation along the Manila Bay from Cavite City to the Bataan province to preserve 26,000 hectares of foreshore area.

Fisher folk are also urging Congress to pass a bill to establish a separate Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources that will be equipped to respond to major issues plaguing the sector.

At present BFAR falls under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, with limited resources and personnel: according to recent statistics, BFAR’s budget for 2013 is 24 million dollars, which Rosales believes is inadequate “for a country of 7,107 islands with an area of 2.2 million square kilometres of territorial ocean waters.”

Until the government steps up its efforts, people like Moriles will continue to struggle.

“There are days when we go without meals just so that the children can go to school,”­ says Moriles, who sees education as a ticket out of poverty.

“We’re old already. When the time comes that there are no more fish in the sea, at least my children will be able to work somewhere else.”

Senegalese President Macky Sall, with Wendy Benchley. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Apr 15 2013 (IPS)

Hours after President Macky Sall of Senegal met in Washington with President Barack Obama late last month, he stepped into a brightly lit hotel meeting room to accept the Peter Benchley Award for National Stewardship of the Ocean, the only prize for ocean conservation given to heads of state.

As he had promised during his campaign, Sall, upon his election a year ago, voided a series of unpopular contracts his predecessor had signed with foreign industrial vessels that catch huge amounts of sardinella, a depleted seagoing fish that is now West Africa’s main source of animal protein, and turn it into fishmeal for foreign aquaculture."It’s very hard to tell local fishermen to stop fishing to feed their country when foreign industrial trawlers are allowed to take away a big catch" -- UBC's Daniel Pauly

“President Sall is now moving forward with plans to assure a sustainable domestic fishery free of foreign exploitation, creating a model for West Africa and the world,” said Wendy Benchley, widow of “Jaws” author Peter Benchley, before handing him the award as representatives from Greenpeace and the World Bank applauded.

But in an interview just before the ceremony, Sall said the ban was not permanent and he was planning to bring back the foreign sardinella trawlers in six months. “We’re giving the stock a year and a half to recover,” he told IPS. “Now we need to find a responsible approach to managing this fishery sustainably so that our fishermen can fish and foreign trawlers can also fish in strictly controlled conditions.”

“That would be suicide,” says Philippe Cury, who heads a fisheries research institute in Sète, France, and has studied West African fisheries. “There’s already not enough sardinella as it is.”

The foreign sardinella vessels have significantly depleted the population, which travels between Senegal and Mauritania, fishing more than twice as much as they can sustain without shrinking, according to a scientific report by the Fishery Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic, he said.

The report, which came out last month, a year after the Russian trawlers left, said that even Senegal’s fleet of dugout canoes was taking too much fish and should be restrained.

“It’s very hard to tell local fishermen to stop fishing to feed their country when foreign industrial trawlers are allowed to take away a big catch,” said Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, Canada, who studies developing world fisheries. “Now that that’s been done, Senegal can try to reduce its own take so the sardinella populations can recover.”

Didier Gascuel of the European University of Brittany in Rennes, France, who is one of the authors of the report, said that, “Even if the artisanal catch stays at that level, the sardinella have a chance to recover.”

Noting that the populations of sardinella grow and shrink naturally based on differences in currents and weather, he added, “But if they bring back the industrial trawlers, all it would take is one bad year for the stock to be wiped out.”

Northern West Africa, where nutrient-rich currents well up from the deep, boasts one of the richest fishing grounds in the world, historically affording a bountiful catch to its coastal population and providing tens of thousands of jobs. Senegal’s fishermen are among Africa’s most accomplished and the national dish, the Thiéboudienne, is based on a succulent grouper called the thiof. Other valuable fish as well as lobster and shrimp were also abundant.

But starting in the 1960s, European and Soviet trawlers moved in, scraping rakes fitted with nets along the bottom and destroying the habitat that fish and crustaceans depend on. They sold the fish abroad after paying governments a tiny percentage of its value for the right to catch it.

“Up until the 1980s, the catch was 80 percent bottom fish and 20 percent sardinella, which was known as the fish of the poor,” said Cury, the French scientist. “Now the proportions are reversed.”

“There’s no more bottom fish,” said Abdou Karim Sall, head of the main association of fishermen and no relation to the president. “The sardinella is all we have left.”

Most of the sardinella is soaked in brine and dried, which allows it to keep its nutritional value for long periods without refrigeration. It is sold throughout the arid Sahel region, where the growing season lasts only three months. It’s the main source of animal protein for tens of millions of poor Africans, according to Birane Samb, a Senegalese fisheries scientist.

In 1994, public indignation in Europe and demonstrations in Senegal led to the non-renewal of fishing permits to foreign-flagged trawler fleets. Other countries in Africa followed suit and today, Mauritania and Morocco are the last to have agreements with the EU, and these may not be renewed.

The much-reduced catch eliminated the livelihood of many fishermen, said Sall of the fishermen’s association. “Most Senegalese immigrants to Europe are fishermen,” he said.

But in a move repeated throughout Africa, the owners of many foreign vessels – more than 100 in Senegal alone – simply created joint ventures with locals, took up the local flag, continued bottom-trawling and sent their best catch to Europe. Meanwhile, prices there have increased far beyond what Senegalese can pay, so nearly all of the shrimp, grouper and octopus that the artisanal fishermen can catch is sold right on the beach to middlemen who pack them in ice and put them on planes for Europe a few hours later.

“Sardinella has become rare on our markets, and we have not had any big fish for many years,” President Sall said in his acceptance speech. “And if you can’t even get sardinella for the Thiéboudienne, that’s a problem.”

Ahmed Diame, a Senegalese Greenpeace ocean campaigner, said Sall, a geological engineer, understands science. “If the scientific community can prove to him that bringing back the foreign trawlers will deplete the stocks and the catch, I think he’ll hold off,” he said. “He’s kept his promises so far. The problem is that this is a coalition government and the fisheries minister, who is pushing for foreign permits, is from another party.”

Víctor Flores and the fruit of two days' fishing at the jetty in Puerto de la Libertad, El Salvador. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
PUERTO DE LA LIBERTAD, El Salvador, Feb 7 2013 (IPS)

Boats were tying up at the jetty and there was a bustle of activity as vendors cried their wares, offering shellfish to potential buyers, while young people, sharp knives in hand, filleted sea bass and red snapper. Meanwhile, on the promenade, octogenarian musicians played old-style cumbias and boleros for restaurant patrons.

But the lighthearted atmosphere belied a sombre reality here in Puerto de la Libertad, a small town on the Pacific coast in the southwest of El Salvador.

Standing next to his small boat, fisherman Víctor Flores gazed with disappointment at the fruits of two days’ labour: just 10 fish heaped in the safe at the bottom of his boat.

“I went to sea happy, thinking I was going to feed my family, but today I don’t want to go home, I am so ashamed and sad,” said Flores.

The 44-year-old man, browned by the sun, told IPS that some years ago there was always catfish, red snapper, sea bass and mackerel on the family table.

But small-scale fishing no longer yields the same results, artisanal fishers in Puerto de la Libertad and other coastal areas told IPS.

In their view, the blame lies squarely on trawling, practised for decades by large shrimp boats that drag their nets across the bottom of the sea, gathering along the way species other than the intended catch and very young specimens that have not yet matured.

“There are various reasons; it cannot be said for certain that it is only due to overfishing,” said Enrique Patiño, head of Fundación ProPesca, an NGO based in the U.S. city of Seattle, Washington, which supports sustainable use of aquatic resources in Central America and the Caribbean.

But the most urgent action is to stop trawling, because it will have an immediate impact, Patiño told IPS.

Not just fish but other sea creatures too are at risk. Shrimp, for example, is less abundant now than it was eight years ago. The shrimp catch fell by 35 percent between 2005 and 2011, according to a report on shrimp fisheries and aquaculture published in May 2012 by the Fisheries and Aquaculture Sector Organisation of the Central American Isthmus (OSPESCA) together with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Of even greater concern is that “since 2005 it has been impossible to calculate the fishable biomass of shrimp,” says the report by Lilián Orellana. “Lack of research monitoring and estimates of reserves of this species make it difficult to determine present stocks.”

The decline in fish catches threatens the ability of the 128 coastal communities spread along El Salvador’s 320-kilometre-long coast to feed themselves.

Fish is an essential part of the diets of some 28,000 artisanal fisherfolk and their families, and also of those who depend on related activities, such as small-scale fish vendors.

Coastal dwellers are happy when they sit down to a plate of fried fish, boiled beans and a sliced tomato, said 47-year-old fisherman Fredy Pérez.

“In El Salvador, 95 percent of the artisanal fish catch is for domestic consumption,” said Patiño, so “naturally, it is important for food security.”

Fish consumption in Latin America and the Caribbean is the second lowest in the world after Africa, at only 9.9 kilogrammes per person per year, according to the “State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2012” report published by the FAO.

In North America, by contrast, annual consumption is 24.6 kilogrammes per person.

And if bottom trawling is not stopped, access to the high quality protein in fish will continue to fall.

In April 2011, after a decade of lobbying, two federations of artisanal fisherfolk were able to persuade parliament to establish an exclusion zone of three nautical miles for industrial shrimp trawlers.

In response, the companies represented by the Salvadoran Chamber of Fisheries and Aquaculture (CAMPAC) lodged a constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court against the new law.

The new law “is forcing companies to shut down their operations, because they cannot survive the restriction”, Waldemar Arnecke, head of CAMPAC, told IPS.

Waning catches are also noticeable in the industrial shrimping sector. And the three-mile coastal strip represents 61 percent of the productive area. At present, only 30 CAMPAC trawlers are working, while an estimated 5,800 small boats are active in artisanal fishing.

The shrimpers argue that the law violates the principle of equality. “Exclusive use of the sea should not be given to some while leaving others out,” said Arnecke.

The economic importance of shrimp exports has been declining since the 1990s, replaced by the new stellar export, tuna; CAMPAC’s clout has fallen commensurately.

Orellana’s report estimates that industrial fishing provides 175 direct jobs and a further 210 indirectly.

According to Arnecke, the federations of cooperatives that promoted the legal reform do not represent the whole spectrum of artisanal fishers. In fact, CAMPAC entered into an alliance with the recently created Federación de Cooperativas de Pescadores Artesanales de la Bahía de Jiquilisco in Puerto El Triunfo, an umbrella group for 12 associations, to work on environmental projects in that southeastern area of the country.

Meanwhile, members of the Federación de Asociaciones Cooperativas Pesqueras Artesanales de El Salvador (FACOPADES) and the Federación de Cooperativas de Producción y Servicios Pesqueros de La Paz (FECOOPAZ), two federations of fishers’ cooperatives, travelled to the capital on Jan. 23 to present their arguments in favour of the law to the Supreme Court.

“We are defending food security, and for that we need to insist on the three-mile zone,” fisherman Armando Erazo, head of the oversight board of FECOOPAZ, told a press conference.

The small-scale fisherfolk complained that the shrimp industry is continually breaking the law, which remains in force.

Arnecke admitted that some boats may have trespassed into the restricted zone, and the authorities have already recorded several incidents. IPS was unable to confirm this – several attempts to contact officials at the Centro de Desarrollo de la Pesca y la Acuicultura (Fisheries and Aquaculture Development Centre), the regulatory body for the sector, yielded no response.

By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, India, Dec 26 2012 (IPS)

Of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) -development targets agreed upon by the international community, whose 2015 deadline is approaching fast – MDG 7 has proven a particular challenge, especially for sprawling, populous countries like India.

With the ambitious aim of improving both natural ecosystems and human environments, MDG 7 comprises numerous targets, from halving the percentage of the world’s population without access to safe drinking water and sanitation, to protecting global fish stocks by preventing illegal fishing and overfishing.

Having pledged millions of euros to helping developing countries achieve the MDGs, the European Union has kept a sharp eye on India, whose regulations and efforts regarding MDG 7 have been inadequate, experts say.

China and India combined are still home to 216 million people without access to clean water and sanitation.
Meanwhile unsustainable fishing practices carry on unchecked. The Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute’s latest census counted 243,939 trawlers, despite an official EU ban on these fishing vessels in shallow waters off the coast.

The EU has also placed a full ban on fishing in protected areas like the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, but commercial fishers take advantage of loopholes in the law to invade these reserves.

Sri Lankan fishermen say a lack of regulations allows them to fish anywhere, for anything. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Dec 1 2012 (IPS)

Somali pirates on the southwest Indian Ocean have become one of the biggest security risks for commercial maritime shipping over the last several years. But even as piracy gave rise to international furore, an unlikely benefactor emerged: bluefin tuna stocks in the Indian Ocean.

Sari Tolvanen, a campaigner with the international environment group Greenpeace, told IPS that when fishing vessels from Indian Ocean nations avoided areas where the Somali pirates operated, the tuna stocks thrived and regained ground lost to decades of unregulated, illegal fishing.

“Now that boats are operating with their own armed guards, the fish stocks are once again under threat,” Tolvanen said. According to Greenpeace, tuna populations in the Indian Ocean are between five to 10 percent of what they were in the 1950s when commercial fishing took off in the region.

But since piracy is obviously not the desired method for safeguarding marine life, Tolvanen and other experts are now pushing governments in the region to take more assertive action to stem illegal fishing practices that they say are decimating fish stocks, some of which are endangered.

One of the biggest problems is the “thousands of multi-day fishing trawlers that go out and fish indiscriminately”, Tolvanen, who recently toured the Indian Ocean aboard the Greenpeace vessel ‘Rainbow Warrior’, told IPS.

Sri Lanka’s weak track record

Sri Lanka has been one of the biggest culprits in violating international environmental regulations, allowing multi-day trawlers to fish at sea with little or no supervision.

In early October, the Rainbow Warrior sailed from Durban, South Africa and travelled to Mozambique, Mauritius, the Maldives and Sri Lanka. Tolvanen said that during the journey Greenpeace encountered numerous vessels of Sri Lankan origin fishing illegally, sometimes in protected marine reserves.

In one such incident on Oct. 24, Greenpeace came upon a registered Sri Lankan wooden hull trawler inside the bounds of the Chagos marine reserve, about 1,500 kilometres south of India.

Chagos was declared a marine reserve by the British government in Apr. 2010. Spanning 640,000 square kilometres, it is the largest “no-take” marine reserve in the world.

Though the boat was not engaged in any fishing activity at the time of the encounter, Tolvanen and other activists suspected that it had been fishing illegally within the reserve before the Greenpeace ship approached.

Having gained access to the ship’s storage areas, activists found them to be filled with sharks.

“The first storage area had mainly sharks (with fins attached) as well as a few tuna and a swordfish. The other, bigger hold was full of sharks. They were relatively small in size and included at least two (endangered) bigeye thresher sharks,” according to a Greenpeace report on the encounter.

Tolvanen told IPS that many of these boats were using gill nets and longlines, which cause extensive damage to marine life. The particular vessel that Greenpeace inspected on Oct. 24 was using a kilometer-long gill line.

“They are contravening international treaties because there is no one monitoring (marine activity),” she said.

During her last visit to Sri Lanka, Tolvanen visited a fishing port in Negombo, a city in the Western Province that sits directly at the mouth of the country’s largest lagoon, and found endangered fish varieties openly up for sale.

Bluefin tuna are particularly impacted by Sri Lanka’s illegal fishing practices: according to the Ministry of Fishing, that particular species made up 42 percent of Sri Lanka’s fish catch last year, amounting to roughly 140,000 tonnes in 2011.

International community issues warning

In the same week as the Rainbow Warrior intercepted the Sri Lankan vessel at Chagos, the European Union warned Sri Lanka and seven other countries that their inaction to prevent illegal fishing could mark them as “uncooperative partners” in the global fight against unlawful marine practices.

The EU reported that these states – including Belize, Cambodia, Fiji, Guinea, Panama, Togo and Vanuatu – had failed to take corrective measures to stem the practice.

“We want these countries as partners to combat illegal fishing. We want them to improve their legal and control systems as required by international rules,” EU Commissioner in charge of maritime affairs and fisheries, Maria Damanaki, said in a statement.

In a report that accompanied the warning the EU noted that, despite being a member of the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC), Sri Lanka does not have a licensing mechanism for high seas fishing, giving free reign to its trawler fleet to fish anywhere, for anything.

Contrary to international statements, Sri Lankan fishing authorities told IPS that they hardly receive any complaints about Sri Lankan registered vessels poaching.

Nimal Hettiarchchi, director general of the department of fisheries and aquatic resources, said so far this year there had been only one such complaint and in 2011 there were “only 11”.

“These are very rare cases,” he said, given that Sri Lanka has at least 3,800 registered multi-day fishing trawlers that spend close to a month out at sea during each fishing trip.

Fishermen working on the trawlers, however, told IPS that there was hardly any monitoring or regulation on where and how they fished.

“I have never heard of anyone facing any punitive action (in Sri Lanka) for fishing illegally or catching endangered species. There is no one who checks what we bring in or where we have fished,” Sujeewa, a fisherman from the southern fishing port of Tangalle who declined to give his full name, told IPS.

He added that on rare occasions, fishermen transferred their catch mid-sea to other boats, sometimes from other countries.

But even if the Fisheries Department, along with its 149 fishing inspectors, do manage to inspect all the catch that comes in, there is no legal mechanism that allows punitive action to be taken against those caught contravening international treaties, Hettiarchchi said.

The official also told IPS the government is currently in the process of amending the 1996 Fishing and Aquatic Resources Act, to “incorporate adherence to international agreements”.

Tolvanen stressed that countries in the region need to urgently reach an agreement on monitoring and levels of fishing.

“There are so many boats going out from so many different countries that (the situation) is completely out of control right now,” she said.

(END)

Artisanal fisheries are being hit by subsidised, foreign vessels. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2012 (IPS)

Calls are mounting for the world’s big fishing powers to stop subsidising international fleets that use destructive methods like bottom trawling in foreign coastal waters, drastically reducing the catch of local artisanal fishers who use nets and fishing lines.

Such subsidies total 27 billion dollars a year, with nearly two-thirds coming from China, Taiwan and Korea along with Europe, Japan and the United States, according to a University of British Columbia study.

Most go to building the ever-more-efficient ships that are required to catch ever-dwindling populations of fish around the world, with yet more subsidies going to offset their growing consumption of fuel as they venture ever farther and deeper to fill their holds.

The result, says Dr. Rashid Sumaila, lead author of the UBC study, is that taxpayers are funding the depletion of the world’s fish populations and the impoverishment of coastal communities abroad.

“A lot of the fish eaten in Europe, the United States and Japan comes from other countries, mostly poor ones,” because the developed countries long ago overexploited their own waters, he told IPS in a telephone interview.

“The more their fleets fish out an area, the harder it gets to keep fishing there and the more they ask for subsidies,” he added. “It’s crazy.”

A senior United Nations official agrees, charging last week that developed countries, which eat three times as much fish per capita as poor ones, are are depleting the oceans and depriving coastal fishermen in developing countries of their livelihood and coastal populations of food.

“Without rapid action” to stop destructive practices, “fisheries will no longer be able to play a critical role in securing the right to food of millions,” the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, said.

Calling for an end to the subsidies, he added, “Future generations will pay the price when the oceans run dry.”

The U.N. report, entitled “Fisheries and the Right to Food“, notes that international conventions ranging from the Law of Sea to the World Trade Organisation have long called for the ban of subsidies to fleets that fish unsustainably, as most today do.

Meanwhile, the money the industrial fleets pay developing countries to fish in their waters goes to often corrupt governments, while the impact is felt by poor coastal communities.

Not only are most industrialised ships uneconomical if they aren’t subsidised, they also provide far fewer jobs: 200 for every 1,000 tonnes of fish caught, versus 2,400 jobs for 1,000 tonnes caught with artisanal methods using small boats, according to another study cited in the U.N. report.

Globally, that translates to a half-million industrial fishermen catching 30 million tonnes of edible fish, discarding at sea another 15 million tonnes, and burning 37 million tonnes of fuel.

The artisanal fisheries also catch about 30 million tonnes of seafood. But they employ 12 million people, discard almost nothing, use a seventh of the fuel and receive a fifth of the subsidies. Also, the nutrition they provide plays a much bigger role in the health of their local populations than the more expensive fish sold in developed countries.

Indeed, nearly all of the fish the small-scale fishers catch is eaten, while the industrial ships, in addition to the 30 million tonnes of edible fish they take, also haul out another 35 million tonnes of everything from other fish to plankton for transformation into oils or fish meal, which are used for fertiliser and feed.

The result: many of the non-food fish that the edible fish depend on have disappeared, along with vast amounts of plankton, the base of the food chain.

While on average 95 percent of rice and 80 percent of wheat are consumed in the country in which they were grown, only 60 percent of the world’s fish is sold in the country in which it was caught, according to the report.

The rest is exported. The industrial fleets pay governments anywhere from two percent (Guinea Bissau) to six percent (the Pacific islands in whose waters half the world’s tuna is caught) for the right to fish in their waters. In comparison, governments receive 30 to 70 percent of the value of oil extracted from their land from the foreign oil companies that extract it.

Some countries have fought back. In May, Senegal’s 50,000 artisanal fishermen, angry that their catch was reduced by destructive European trawler fleets and backed by NGOs like Greenpeace, forced a new government to cancel fishing licenses to foreign fleets granted by the previous one.

Namibia, for its part, has largely banned foreign fleets from its rich waters since it became independent in 1990 and has developed its own industrial fishery.

The Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, have closed its tuna fishery to foreign industrial fleets in favour of small-scale pole-and-line vessels, which yield better-quality fish.

The U.N. report called on coastal governments to negotiate new agreements with foreign fishing fleets that would keep those away from the coasts so the sea bottoms can heal while small-scale fisheries recover.

“These resources must be turned away from over-exploitation and toward the benefit of local communities,” de Schutter said.

Eighty percent of Mexico’s fish catch comes from the Pacific Ocean. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 21 2012 (IPS)

The authorities in Mexico seem to have thrown in the towel in the fight against illegal fishing, which is hurting fisheries, the environment, and incomes.

An estimated 30 to 50 percent of the fish caught in this country are illegally captured, whether out of season, using banned techniques and methods, over quota, or by boats fishing without a license.

“It’s a sector that is difficult to regulate,” Rodrigo Gallegos, head of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO), told IPS. The institute is about to publish a report on productivity, regulations and the environmental impact of fishing. “In practice, there is free access, and it is difficult to control the illegal flow of trade.”

Compliance with laws is a problem in Mexico, which has become one of the main hubs of drug trafficking in Latin America and the world, and where 90 percent of crimes go unsolved.

Last year, the catch in this country totalled 1.64 million tons of fish, worth 1.28 billion dollars, more than 800 million of which were exported, according to the National Commission for Fishing and Aquaculture.

Mexico has extensive areas of continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Ocean, as well as nearly 20,000 square kilometres of coastal lagoons, estuaries, lakes, reservoirs and rivers, rich in fish stocks.

But because the fishing is done without controls, many species are over-exploited.

The 2012 National Fishing Charter, issued by the ministry of agriculture, acknowledges the heavy over-exploitation, and recommends curbing the pressure on stocks of shrimp, sardines and tuna.

In 2010, global environmental watchdog Greenpeace put red snapper, shrimp, grouper, tuna, sardines, sharks and rays on its Red List of most endangered species in Mexico.

“The situation is conflict-ridden; there are many people interested in a scarce resource, and the policies governing access to them are unclear,” said Juan Aceves, of the marine conversation programme run by the Niparajá Natural History Society, which promotes protection of biodiversity in the Baja California peninsula in northwest Mexico.

The laws are not enforced “and there is not a strong culture of respecting laws and regulations in the fishing industry,” he told IPS.

“What works is to work with certified communities,” said IMCO’s Gallegos. “It is possible to apply environmental measures to fishing, it’s a sector that adapts easily. But productive reconversion is not viable.”

The institute recommends producing reliable data, modifying the subsidy for boat fuel, and reforming the fishing law to strengthen environmental practices.

The Pacific coast accounts for 80 percent of fishing production, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean represent 18 percent, and rivers and lakes represent the remaining two percent.

Measures taken by the authorities to curb pressure on the fisheries include fishing bans on species like shrimp, octopus and shark, the replacement of boats, and the cancellation of permits.

But the impact of these actions is not significant. More than 1,000 fishing permits were issued for shrimp and shark last year, and only 46 were cancelled.

A report published two years ago by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) called for clear fishing regulations.

The study interviewed small-scale fishers, who complained about the rise in the cost of fuel, the drop in catches, and the low prices fetched by their products, which they said did not even cover the costs of the fishing trips.

People working in the fishing industry know what their problems are: too many boats, the capture of immature specimens, bans that are not enforced, and a lack of alternative employment opportunities in coastal communities.

Of the country’s 94,000 fishing boats, 90,000 are small-scale boats or work on rivers. But the remaining 4,000 are industrial fishing boats, which account for 40 percent of the national catch.

“Small-scale fishing has been relegated, and that has led to many people working in irregular conditions,” Aceves said.

Niparajá has been working since 2004 with a group of 160 fishers in the northwestern state of Baja California Sur to restore the fisheries, by promoting sustainable fishing techniques, the definition of fishing seasons, and better organisation.

The community there catches around 50 tons a year and has defined 11 areas where fishing is banned, so the species can recover.

Since 2003, Niparajá and Community and Biodiversity, a local non-governmental organisation, have organised the “De pescador a pescador” conference to allow fisherpersons to share their experiences every three years.

Aceves said the authorities “want an export sector that generates employment” but “paying little, and planning less.”

His advice? “The government should sit down to plan, and to decide what kind of fishing industry they want.”

Lallmamode Mohamedally, a Mauritian fisher, points to a European vessel offloading its catch at the port near Les Salines, a fishing town close to the country’s capital Port Louis. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

By Nasseem Ackbarally
PORT LOUIS, Aug 9 2012 (IPS)

“Look out there, the blue one…. that is a European Union fishing vessel that is threatening our livelihood,” says Lallmamode Mohamedally, a Mauritian fisherman, as he points to a boat offloading its catch at the Les Salines port, close to the country’s capital Port Louis.

He is one of the fishers who have returned after a hard day at sea with their boats almost empty. Pollution and tourist activity have reduced the fish catch on the island’s lagoons over the past few years.

But local fishers say a February agreement between the EU and this Indian Ocean island nation, which allows European vessels to catch 5,500 tonnes of fish a year for three years at a cost of 660,000 euros annually, has made the situation worse.

While there are no official figures to confirm this, the 3,500 local fishers, who now have to compete with modern industrialised fishing boats, say that their catch has gone down by 50 to 60 percent.

And the Les Salines fishers believe that the 86 vessels from companies based in the EU, which are fishing in the area, are stealing their livelihoods.

“These big vessels are scratching the sea around Mauritius and taking away all the fish,” says Mohamedally.

While most fishers want the EU vessels to leave, Mohamedally says he would not mind them operating in Mauritian waters “only if they fish like everybody else, like the Taiwanese and the Japanese.”

“Only longliners please. No seines. Those vessels catch all types of fish, small and big alike,” he says.

Long line fishing is a commercial technique that uses hundreds or sometimes thousands of baited hooks, which hang from a single line. This type of fishing commonly targets swordfish, tuna, halibut, and sablefish. Seines use surrounding nets.

However, Mauritian authorities believe that this is the only way to exploit its vast exclusive economic zone or EEZ of 2.3 million square kilometres.

Local fishing companies here are small and do not have the ability to fish on such a large scale. The 5,500 tonnes of fish that Mauritius has allowed the EU to catch each year is in stark contrast to the few tonnes the 34 fishermen of Les Salines catch in a year.

Currently the fisheries sector in Mauritius represents only one percent of the country’s GDP, and the local fish production is only 5,100 tonnes.

Mohamedally says that in the past fish were abundant three to four nautical miles from the coast. Today, the fishers travel almost 15 nautical miles out to sea, but many still come back without a catch.

“What will happen in five years time to our jobs? They are giving us an egg and taking an ox out of our sea,” adds Mohamedally, referring to the 660,000 euros annually that Mauritius has agreed in payment by the EU in exchange for fishing rights in its EEZ.

Judex Rampol, chairman of the Syndicat des Pêcheurs, a fishers’ association, is furious about this. “This is peanuts,” he tells IPS. If local fisherfolk had the capacity to fish so far out at sea, they would earn about 15 million euros for the 5,500 tonnes of fish the EU is now allowed to catch.

However, Minister of Fisheries Nicolas Von-Mally believes Mauritius needs help to exploit its vast EEZ.

“We have no fishing vessels. Should we depend on locals, many fishes would have long died of old age,” he says.

Von-Mally adds that canning factories on the island process the tuna caught by the EU vessels. However, it is sold mainly on the European market.

He adds that tuna is migratory, and if it is not caught in the Mauritian EEZ, it will swim to the zones of the neighbouring Indian Ocean islands of Seychelles and Maldives. “We’ll thus lose revenue,” he says.

Bahim Khan Taher, manager of Taher Seafoods, a small local fishing company, tells IPS that he would like to exploit Mauritius’ fish stock, but he needs modern vessels, equipment and financial incentives to fish in the EEZ.

“If we get some help from the government in terms of fiscal incentives, we could also go out fishing there. This would boost our seafood hub exports,” Taher says.

Meanwhile, environmentalists are concerned that overfishing may deplete tuna stocks in the Indian Ocean. Mauritian oceanographer and environmental engineer Vassen Kauppaymoothoo is one of them.

“The EU vessels are here because the stocks in the other oceans have collapsed. They have been overfished by vessels from Portugal, France and Spain. The only ocean where there is still some fish is the Indian Ocean,” he tells IPS, adding that 5,500 tonnes a year was overfishing and would deplete resources.

He adds that while Mauritius does not have the capacity to fish its EEZ, this does not mean that they should allow foreigners to do so. He says Morocco decided to close its EEZ to foreigners in a decision to solely keep its fish stock for its local population.

“There is no reason to loot my house because I do not have the means to exploit its wealth,” Kauppaymoothoo argues.

But the head of the EU Delegation in Port Louis, Alessandro Mariani, tells IPS that they are helping to create jobs, not take them away.

“In Mauritius alone, 5,500 jobs benefit from the tuna that is disembarked by the EU vessels,” he says.

Mariani claims that there is no competition between the EU fleet and the local fishers because they operates very far away from each other. The EU vessels fish 15 nautical miles from the coast, and the locals at three nautical miles.

“We are also targeting different fish species,” he says.

Mariani says the EU is very sensitive about the tuna stocks in the Indian Ocean.

“Our fishing efforts are guided by scientific research. The Indian Ocean Tuna Commission Scientific Committee said in October 2011 that there is no overfishing in this region,” he says.

Von Mally adds: “We are not shooting at our own feet. We want fish to be always available in our seas for future generations.”

They both deny that the EU placed pressure on the Mauritian government to sign the agreement. “This is simply not true. Mauritius and the EU are partners and we always discuss things about the interest of both the EU and Mauritius,” says Mariani.

NGOs are implementing Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in Papua New Guinea to secure marine ecosystems and fisher folk’s livelihoods for the future. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
PORT MORESBY, Jul 16 2012 (IPS)

Coastal fisheries in Papua New Guinea, used primarily by local subsistence fisher folk, will face increasing pressure from climate change, compounding the twin problems of population growth and overfishing.

Regional organisations like the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), along with local NGOs, are pushing for the development of Marine Protected Areas to safeguard the future of marine ecosystems and livelihoods.

Nancy and her family are fishers from the Hula village in the Central Province, located on the south coast of Papua New Guinea.  Over the years, she has noticed striking changes in local fish populations.

“In the 1970s our fishermen were still using traditional fishing methods. One or two would go out in a canoe and catch fish with spears,” Nancy recounted. “There was a lot of fish in our coastal area then.

But in the 1980s people began buying large dinghies and using expansive fishing nets.

“One family can own up to four or five dinghies,” she continued. “Now there is less fish being caught, especially the large fish, and fishermen are trying to sell everything they get, even the tiny fish, octopus and shells.  There are fewer fish caught and they are more expensive.”

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 95 percent of small-scale fishers are located in developing countries and over 500 million people in the developing world depend on fisheries for food security.  Coastal subsistence fisheries production in Papua New Guinea is more than 30,000 tonnes per annum, compared to coastal commercial fisheries, which produce approximately 6,000 tonnes annually.

Papua New Guinea, part of the Coral Triangle, which includes the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Philippines, Timor Leste and Malaysia, is home to diverse marine ecosystems.  Coastal resources of the Coral Triangle – comprised of 53 percent of the world’s coral and home to 76 percent of all known corals and 37 percent of coral reef fish species – sustain 363 million people.

But climate change, especially increased air and sea surface temperatures and ocean acidification, is predicted to degrade reef habitats and spur the migration of marine species away from the equator and toward the polar extremes. Ninety percent of coral reefs could be endangered by 2030 and the SPC predicts Pacific reef fish populations could decline by 20 percent by 2050.

Dr. Augustine Mungkaje, director of the Motupore Island Research Centre at the University of Papua New Guinea’s marine and coastal research unit, said that impacts of climate change will slowly “alter the functioning of ecosystems (like) coral reefs, sea grass beds, mangroves and coastal pelagic ecosystems”.

“Fish stocks in many parts of PNG are still in a good state, except in areas where there are dense populations and close to urban centres where better markets for sale of catch from coastal fishing exist,” he continued. “This makes overfishing an immediate threat and for the future climate change is a threat that we have to prepare for by developing resilient strategies to assist coastal communities.”

Marine Protected Areas

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) advises that strategies for sustainable fisheries should include assessing the status of fish populations, implementing monitoring systems and establishing sound management approaches, such as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

MPAs are designated geographical areas, incorporating ocean resources, where human activities are subject to varying restrictions in order to preserve ecosystems and address the socio-economic needs of coastal communities. In 2010, it was estimated that MPAs covered 0.32 percent of terrestrial waters in Papua New Guinea.

In Kimbe Bay, West New Britain province, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has worked in close collaboration with local communities since 1992 to develop the Kimbe Bay Marine Protected Area Network, which embraces 14 areas of marine conservation interest.  TNC’s programmes are helping the government to achieve its goals within the Coral Triangle Initiative: a multilateral partnership of Coral Triangle nations addressing issues of climate change, food security and marine biodiversity.

The custom design of each MPA in Kimbe Bay, a habitat vulnerable to ocean acidification, coral bleaching and coastal deforestation, and home to 100,000 people, is based on biodiversity and socio-economic assessments and objectives of climate change resilience. MPAs include coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass areas, turtle nesting beaches and significant island habitats for sea birds.

“First we communicate knowledge and awareness of MPAs and then (host landowners and communities) let us know if they are interested,” Barbara Masike, project manager for Kimbe Bay Marine Management Area, explained.

“They are the resource owners and users and we have to make sure that everyone is in agreement.  We only facilitate the process. They have to set up site committees, make decisions on how the areas are managed, agree the management plan and make sure rules are adhered to.”

Restricting human activities in protected areas may include prohibition of the dumping of waste in the sea and on beaches, night diving, the cutting of mangroves and fishing and harvesting of marine resources for specific periods in no-take areas.

Mungkaje said scientific research had proven the effectiveness of MPAs to conserving coastal fisheries.

“It is a good tool to use in enhancing stocks in heavily fished areas,” he claimed. “However, the size of MPAs and where they are placed in relation to water currents and proximity of other critical habitats, such as reefs and mangroves, are important determinants of whether or not MPAs will enhance fish stocks.”

Since the creation of an MPA comprising 724.3 square kilometres at Lolobau in 2008, and another of 60.9 square kilometres at Bialla in Kimbe Bay, local communities have noticed increased numbers and size of fish in their waters.

Promoting food security and combating poverty in small fishing communities, which can be exacerbated by lack of public services, exclusion from the benefits of development and susceptibility to natural disasters is also a goal of marine protected areas. TNC is training community-based teams to monitor marine resources, including fish being used for human consumption.

“In Papua New Guinea, we have to put our local people’s needs up front; our work must link to people’s socio-economic needs,” Masike emphasised.

In a 2010 report on the state of the world’s fisheries, the FAO pointed out that the vulnerability of fisheries and fishing communities depends partly on the ability of individuals or systems to anticipate and adapt to change.

(END)

Science has proven that protected areas "seed" the surrounding seas with additional fish. Credit: Bruno de Giusti/CC BY 2.5

By Stephen Leahy
CAIRNS, Australia, Jul 13 2012 (IPS)

It takes a village to protect a reef and sustain a local fishery, more than two decades of experience now shows.

And even well-intentioned governments can do more harm than good, community-based conservation experts reported here at the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Cairns, Australia.

“The first locally managed marine areas doubled the fish biomass (amount and size of fish) in just a few years,” said Alan White, senior scientist with the Nature Conservancy, Global Marine Initiative, Hawaii.

Locally managed areas (LMAs) were first set up in the 1980s in the Philippines. The local community established a no-fishing zone of just 15 hectares (ha) of coral reef and in three or four years the fish biomass doubled, White told IPS. It was all done without government involvement.

“Once the community sees the benefits, they continue and the idea spreads,” he said.

There’s been too much top-down management of fisheries by governments, said Helene Marsh, professor of environmental science and dean of graduate research studies at James Cook University. Even in Australia, fishers want more local management and to be directly involved, Marsh told IPS.

“Before LMAs began in the 1980s, fish catches were in sharp declines and desperate fishers were using dynamite to catch the last remaining fish,” said Jovelyn Cleofe, country coordinator, Philippines for the Locally Managed Marine Area Network.

Now there are more than 1,000 LMAs in the Philippines. The no-fish areas are quite small – between 10 and 20 ha – but numbers of fish have increased, the diversity of fish species has doubled, and the health of the corals improved.

Equally important, fishers’ incomes have risen because they are catching more fish with less effort. And in some cases they earning additional money from tourism, Cleofe said.

Now the latest science has proven that protected areas “seed” the surrounding seas with additional fish. When fish eggs hatch, the microscopic fish larvae drift on the ocean currents which made it extremely difficult to know where they ended up, explains Geoff Jones, of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia.

Jones and colleagues took DNA fingerprints of thousands of adult fish inside protected areas in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Then they went looking for baby fish in the areas where fishing is allowed and tried to match up their DNA to the adult fish to see if they were their parents. The researchers found far more matches than expected – 70 percent in some areas – meaning that most baby fish had come from the protected areas.

“We now have proof that at least 50 percent of the baby fish – including some as far as 20 kilometres away – came from protected areas,” Jones told IPS.

LMAs are a great strategy and the concept has expanded rapidly, said Stacy Jupiter, Fiji country programme director, Wildlife Conservation Society. “Science also tells us that it is the big fish that lay the most eggs.”

In Fiji, even where there’s extensive coastal development like hotels, corals and fish inside LMA’s are doing well, whereas other areas are not, she said. However, this only works when the communities have full control over the access to their fishing grounds and to the reefs. It’s also important that everyone complies with the rules.

When control and decisions are at the community level they are more likely to consider the needs of future generations of people, said Andrew Wayne, a member of the Palau National Congress and chair of Protected Areas. Palau is a nation of 20,000 people spread over a chain of islands in the western Pacific.

Where control is held entirely by the government like in the island Guam, the reefs are overfished and in decline, Wayne told IPS.

“It is important that everyone in the community and their neighbours are informed about the rules of the LMA. There also needs to be effective enforcement,” he said.

Peer pressure and respect for rules are crucial. So is education. “We are working with children to teach them to love their reefs and that will make things easier in the future,” Wayne said.

Palau’s traditional chiefs have often declared a “bul”, or ban, on fishing in an area when they noticed fish declines. There is still respect for this but it is in conflict with Palau’s modern democracy, he said. Unfortunately, there is also a growing Western tendency to focus on how a resource can benefit an individual versus the entire community, including future generations.

“If the local community feels they own the resource and will always own it, it makes all the difference.”

This past Tuesday, May 22, marked World Biodiversity Day, but it came and went without too much public interest.

The loss of biodiversity has not received the same amount of attention as other environmental problems such as climate change, in part because there is less scientific knowledge and consensus on the subject, but not because it is a less urgent threat to life on Earth.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the rate at which species are becoming extinct is estimated to be up to 1,000 times higher today than pre-industrial times. Scientists have called this the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history – and the only one caused by a single living creature: humans.

Over the last few decades humans have changed ecosystems to a degree that has not previously been seen. To sustain economic growth and the increasing demand for food, resources, and space, large parts of the planet’s natural areas have been transformed into cultivated systems such as agriculture and plantations and into built environment.

But what is biodiversity and why should we care about it? According to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), it is the “variability among living organisms from all sources”. To understand the importance of biodiversity in a given habitat or ecosystem, think of biodiversity as a gigantic house of cards, with each card representing a single species or ecosystem function.

A few cards can be removed without any significant change to the house. But if the wrong card is pulled out, the whole house can collapse.

In the same way, biodiversity is a complex system of literally millions of different species – from tiny microorganisms to the top predators – interlinked through food webs, pollination, predation, and many other chemical and biological interactions, many of which we don’t even know about. Damaging part of the system – wiping out a few key species, for instance – may lead to the collapse of the whole system.

The world’s oceans and forests are particularly threatened. Industrial fishing, with trawls from large vessels, causes extensive damage to both marine health and species biodiversity. Strong global policies, such as the phasing out of existing industrial fishing subsidies, are needed to bring fishing yields to a sustainable level and protect marine biodiversity.

Deforestation is another major cause of biodiversity loss. Between 1990 and 2010, the global forest area shrank by 3.4 percent, or 1.4 million square kilometere – an area roughly the size of Mexico. Deforestation continues at a high rate in many countries, mainly in the form of conversions of forests to agricultural land, much of which is done illegally.

Preserving the world’s forests and natural habitats requires actions at the local, national, and global levels, but so far there has been a lack of political success. In 2002, the CBD committed to achieve “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss” by 2010. But when delegates met in Nagoya, Japan in 2010, they concluded that the target had not been met, whether measured globally, regionally, or nationally.

The target was renewed with the adoption of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, with 20 new targets, known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. In early 2011, an intergovernmental panel agreed to create the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) with the aim of making 2020 biodiversity targets reachable.

On a national level, stronger policies need to be adapted and subsidies that drive deforestation must be phased out. Workers in the often illegal logging industry should be assigned jobs that help protect the forest ecosystems rather than destroying them.

Such an approach can be replicated in other areas. In Brazil, for example, the TAMAR sea turtle programme hires ex-turtle poachers and pays them wages to protect rather than exploit the turtle population.

Cooperation between governments is also necessary to raise global awareness of biodiversity loss and to create targets to reverse this loss. The upcoming Rio+20 conference presents a great opportunity to renew and fortify global and national commitments to halt biodiversity loss.

Combating the sixth mass extinction will require a number of concrete measures to protect the world’s common biological wealth, and it is important that international leaders stand up and start making real decisions that can help protect nature.

*Bo Normander is Director of Worldwatch Institute Europe and author of “Biodiversity: Combatting the Sixth Mass Extinction” in the Worldwtach Institute’s annual flagship report State of the World 2012: Moving Toward Sustainable Prosperity. Supriya Kumar is the Interim Communications Manager at Worldwatch.

(END)

In Antigua, these boats now sail through a channel, behind where they are docked, where coral once thrived. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua, May 23 2012 (IPS)

Eli Fuller is a third-generation Antiguan who, for the past two decades, has been exploring the Antigua and Barbuda coastline. But he laments the fact that he can no longer see the coral that he recalls were somewhat of an underwater jungle when he was a young boy, akin to what you’d see in the Amazon rain forest.

Eli Fuller, a marine environmentalist and third-generation Antiguan who remembers when coral reefs once resembled underwater jungles. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

“Nobody ever thought – I didn’t think – the corals would be dead in my lifetime,” Fuller, a marine environmentalist, told IPS.

“When I was a child, no sailboat would ever sail through certain areas, but nowadays yachts are sailing through all of these channels because the reef is…dead, gone. They’re broken up.”

Scientists say warmer seas and a record hurricane season in 2005 devastated more than half of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. The World Conservation Union (WCU) warned in a report that this severe damage to reefs would probably become a regular event, given predictions of rising global temperatures due to climate change.

Fuller said Caribbean countries could do several things to help damaged coral reefs rejuvenate, including designating certain places as marine protected areas.

A protected area is a specific region of land or water legally protected from specific human activities because of its ecological, archaeological or other type of value. A marine protected area may be declared, for instance, to safeguard its fish stocks, reefs, wreckages, breeding sanctuaries and the like.

In Belize, marine protected areas where fishing was forbidden rejuvenated much more quickly than did unprotected reefs in Jamaica after suffering similar hurricane damage, Fuller said.

When a coral gets damaged, algae naturally grow on it, he explained. Then, parrotfish and other herbivorous fish like blue tang eat the algae.

In Belize’s marine protected areas, “there are millions of parrotfish. The hurricanes came, destroyed the coals, algae grew up and the fish just ate it all and slowly the coral starts growing back.”

Protected areas, in name only

Fuller said while technically there are marine protected areas dictated by the Antigua and Barbuda Fisheries Act, in reality, there is no real protection.

As a result, “you have large scale overfishing of key species…important to keep(ing) the reefs healthy,” he said. A ban on hunting parrotfish and blue tang would help corals recover much more quickly from hurricanes, but as Fuller pointed out, parrotfish are easy to shoot with a spear gun, “and a lot of local people love parrotfish”.

“If there is one fish in Antigua I’d say you have to protect, it’s the parrotfish, but the Fisheries Department exports it,” Fuller added.

Apart from Belize, other examples of successful, zoned marine protected areas exist in the Caribbean.

In Antigua, the absence of barrier reefs forces developers to use boulders to protect against groundswells coming ashore. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

The 6,600 hectares Tobago Cays Marine Park in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is divided into nine different zones. Included are specifications for mooring different sized vessels and for turtle and seabird reserves. The protected area offers great economic benefits to the population and is a valued part of its social, cultural and environmental landscape.

Soufriere Marine Management Area in St. Lucia, encompassing 11 kilometres of coastline, is divided into five zones. Conflicts between different types of users and declining near-shore catches led to the reserve’s creation.

Many marine protected areas, including Tobago Cays, prohibit fishing, thus allowing sea life in the area to grow and reproduce unimpeded.

Studies have also shown that such no-fish areas help “replenish” fish stocks in other areas, with increased catch sizes and larger individual fish. No-fish zones also protect other sea life that might otherwise inadvertently be caught in nets.

The fishing conundrum

Vince Best, environmental scientist and lecturer at the Antigua State College, told IPS that coral bleaching provides direct evidence of the effects of climate change on reef ecosystems. Scientists speculate that coral bleaching will become an annual event by approximately 2020.

“Another detrimental effect of global climate change,” Best noted, will be the increase in carbon dioxide in oceans that will increase the acidity of ocean water, therefore “reducing the solubility of other compounds…needed by corals in reef-building.”

To this end, he said, administrations in Antigua and Barbuda, as well as other nations with this unique source of life, need to do more to protect their coral reefs.

“Many of the administrations in affected nations have concentrated on economic growth, primarily with little regard to the damage caused to the very resources which allow for said economic growth,” Best said.

For example, “in the Caribbean, we are highly reliant on tourism as the mainstay of our particular economies, yet coral reefs are one of the many resources which attract tourists to our shores.”

And while actual estimates of the direct economic value of coral reefs to Antigua and Barbuda are difficult to obtain, established research has estimated that the communities located in coastal areas, as well as national economies in the general Caribbean region, are likely to sustain substantial economic losses should the current trends in coral reef degradation and destruction continue.

It has been estimated that fisheries associated with coral reef in the Caribbean region are responsible for generating net annual revenues, which have been valued at or above approximately 837 million East Caribbean dollars, or about 310 million U.S. dollars.

Continued degradation of the region’s few remaining coral reefs would diminish these net annual revenues by an estimated 95-140 million U.S. dollars annually by 2015. The subsequent decrease in dive tourism could also profoundly affect annual net tourism revenues.

Meanwhile, one of the Caribbean’s main sources of income is simultaneously causing some of the worst damage to reefs.

“Fishing has historically been recognized as a given to the growth of the Caribbean economy,” Best said. It not only serves as a source of food for the region, but as part of the export market, it also contributes millions of dollars to regional economies.

In the Caribbean, Best said, fisheries are an unregulated “free access resource”. Yet “the location and distribution of the fish are highly predictable,” he added.

While all hope is not lost, Best pointed out that tremendous damage has already been done to reef systems in the Caribbean, and in some cases, he said, damage is so severe that many of the reefs are beyond repair.

But he said there are a number of inexpensive and practical measures, which can be taken to ameliorate the physical status of reefs in the Caribbean. One initiative, the Reefs at Risk project, suggests several possible actions.

They include “the establishment of better management practices to encourage sustainable fisheries, to protect reefs from direct damage, and to integrate the sometimes conflicting approaches to management in the watersheds and adjacent waters around coral reefs”.

“Fundamental to supporting these actions is wider involvement of the public and stakeholders in the management process, as well as an improved level of understanding of the importance of coral reefs,” he added.

(END)

A glimpse of seagrass close to the seashore of the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park, which is home to a spectrum of marine wildlife Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
RAMESHWARAM, India, May 2 2012 (IPS)

Forest officials of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve abutting the Palk Straits between India and Sri Lanka have reported a decline in marine wildlife, as smugglers exploiting lax conservation laws in the region tank up on protected species used in traditional Chinese medicines and fine dining.

In coordination with the Indian Coast Guard, forest officials have recorded more than 200 cases of smuggling, accounting for the loss of over 13,000 kilogrammes of sea cucumbers (Holothurian scabra) and seahorses (Hippocampus species) in the last 16 months alone.

Illegal marine wildlife traders in India smuggle their catch to neighbouring countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, where the red-flagged items become legal marine exports to other Southeast Asian countries due to exemptions in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

“The seahorse found in the Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park is one of the five rarer species of seahorses,” Shekhar Kumar Niraj, field director of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, informed IPS.

In 2001, India’s stringent Wildlife Protection Act listed sea cucumbers and seahorses as ‘schedule I’, thereby making forest officials legally responsible for their protection.

Around the same time as this classification came into play, the markets for traditional Chinese medicines exploded.

A fragile ecosystem

The Gulf of Mannar Marine National Park (GOMMNP), part of the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve, is an undersea reserve formed by the strip of land that once connected India to Sri Lanka. The peninsula divides the Palk Straits in the north from the Gulf of Mannar in the south.

The fragile reef ecosystem is shallow and forms the habitat for corals, crabs, clown fish, dugongs, dolphins, porpoise, prawns, parrot fish, sea cucumbers, seahorses, sea snakes, turtles, whales and a whole list of highly endangered endemic marine wildlife.

The marine diversity includes four species of shrimp, 106 species of crabs, 17 types of sea cucumbers, 466 species of molluscs, 108 species of sponges and 100 species of echinoderms.

More than 2000 species of fin fish are found in the Gulf of Mannar and seagrass is also clearly visible in the shallow sea. Prosopsis jujuba, a shrub forest species endemic to dry arid zones, “is surprisingly dominant in the mangroves and mud flats, amply justifying the protection lent to the marine national park,” Sundar Kumar, the wildlife warden of the underwater reserve, told IPS.

“The hotbeds and kingpins of marine wildlife crime are in Rameshwaram, Mandapam, and Tuticorin all around the Indian coast of the GOMMNP,” T. Rajendran, assistant conservator of forests for the marine reserve, told IPS.

Lose-lose deal for fisherfolk

“There is no local consumption or markets (for smuggled goods). Only the middlemen gain. These are the (people) who are connected to international crime syndicates,” added Niraj. These ‘middlemen’ buy sea cucumbers from fisherfolk for about 50 dollars per kilogramme and sell them for a profit of 600 percent, at 307 dollars per kilogramme.

“Sea cucumbers have ecologically significant roles in scavenging coasts and seabeds, which in turn helps other species like corals and seagrass to flourish and propagate,” Niraj explained.

“Only owners of trawler fishing boats indulge in poaching sea cucumbers, which is a double whammy for us traditional fishermen; not only is the catch depleting, but fuel prices are increasing. The additional burden of illegal poaching of marine wildlife by trawler fishermen make us suspect in the eyes of the enforcement agencies,” lamented K. David, a traditional fisherman in Rameshwaram.

Field director Niraj disputes the fact that trawler fisherfolk are the only smugglers involved in this rackets, pointing to statistics of recent raids that show traditional (Dinghy) fishermen also indulging in the smuggling of sea cucumbers and seahorses.

David is convinced that traditional fishing will come to an end when his generation is “dead and gone”, since youngsters like 10-year-old Vishal Selvan and 11-year-old Alan want to become merchant navy captains and Indian Administrative Service officers respectively.

In order to keep traditional fishermen from engaging with smugglers out of economic desperation, employment schemes have been put in place to guarantee the livelihoods of various fisherfolk, in the face of depleting fish stocks.

“The alternative livelihood initiatives carried out by the United Nations Development Programme-Global Environmental Facility (UNDP-GEF) through the Gulf of Mannar Marine Biosphere Reserve Trust (GoMBRT) include Palmyra mat weaving and thatch making, clown fish and other ornamental fish fattening, goat rearing, jasmine cultivation, betel leaf cultivation, salt-fish making and plaster of Paris for doll-making,” V. Deepak Samuel, programme specialist at the energy and environment unit of the UNDP-GEF (GoMBRT), told IPS.

Unchecked crime

“We are as yet unable to trace the route of smuggled goods and links beyond Sri Lanka to markets in the Far East, primarily because once the goods arrive in Sri Lanka they become legal exports, blocking our investigations further,” explained a wildlife crime inspector, speaking under condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.

Patrolling the sea is all the more challenging given enforcement agencies’ meagre logistical capacity.

Led by Rajendran, the entire patrol operation includes four range forest officers, 22 foresters, 11 guards, two watchers and 33 anti-poaching camp watchers who share six jeeps, six wireless sets, two base stations, six anti-poaching camps, eight mechanised patrol boats and three speed boats between them – to patrol an area of 10,500 square kilometres or 18,900 nautical miles.

They lack night vision lamps and financial incentives. They are no match for the 25,000 well equipped trawlers that fish illegally across the whole Marine Biosphere Reserve every day.

Still, the greatest challenge is not out on the water.

“Opposition to protection of marine wildlife (and) fishes comes from even official establishments like the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, the Marine Products Export Development Authority and the National Institute of Oceanography – all in the name of livelihoods,” Niraj said.

“Growing numbers of anthropologists propagate illusions glossing over the likely consequences that would emerge should we lose the remaining biodiversity… They quote the Convention on Biological Diversity where sustainability, right to access and benefits sharing are the guiding principles. However, sustainability that applies to economic principles may not exactly apply to ecology because of biological principles that are very different,” Niraj explained.

Poaching of sea cucumbers even in the seas around the Andaman Nicobar Islands is so rampant that natives report they hardly sight sea cucumbers anymore.

*Malini Shankar is a wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker based in Bangalore.

The arrest and release of a Dutch activist in Japan has put in bad light this country’s refusal to heed international calls to limit traditional dolphin and whale hunting practices in favour of conservation.

“The arrest (of Erwin Vermeulen) was intended to intimidate us to leave Taiji (a fishing town where dolphins are corralled for mass slaughter),” said Scott West, director for investigations with the United States-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS).

“But the effect is the opposite as more volunteers are signing up to join our activities to stop dolphin and whale killing,” said West.

By sending foreign volunteers like Vermeulen to Taiji, SSCS has raised hackles in Japan, especially after it took a confrontational stance by publishing footage of bloody dolphin hunts in the southern Japan fishing town.

Taiji’s dolphin slaughters came under international glare in 2010 after a film on the annual ritual, titled ‘The Cove’, claimed the Academy Award for best documentary in that year.

While Vermeulen’s release on Feb. 22 proved that he had not pushed a guard on Dec. 16 as charged, activists say it did nothing to change deep-rooted attitudes to cetacean hunting in this country.

“Vermeulen won his case because he did not break the law. That does not mean anti-whalers have gained respect in Japan. The real test is whether the activists can stop Taiji from killing whales and dolphins,” said Kazue Suzuki, spokesperson for Greenpeace Japan.

While it is also opposed to whaling, Greenpeace Japan has distanced itself from Sea Shepherd’s confrontational approach, preferring to focus its campaign on issues such as mercury contamination of whale meat.

The local media portrays SSCS as an aggressive organisation, citing its use of laser beams and drones to harass whalers.

In a January editorial, ‘Japan Times’, a leading English language daily, accused the organisation of “crossing the line from peaceful protest and reasonable monitoring to violent confrontation that could harm a crew member on either side.”

But the controversy appears to be playing out in Sea Shepherd’s favour.

On Feb. 21 a federal court in Seattle denied an injunction sought by the Japanese Institute for Cetacean Research to restrain Sea Shepherd from carrying on its anti-whaling activities in the Antarctic Ocean.

Western countries, including the U.S. and Australia, that respect an International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on whaling, want Japan to stop its ‘scientific expeditions’.

While the IWC, under a 1987 decision, allows the killing of 1,000 whales in the Antarctic Ocean for research purposes, annually, much of the meat ends up being sold commercially.

Activists have, over many years, accused Japan of taking advantage of the IWC quota to persist with commercial whaling, endangering the mammals.

Japan is also being accused of spending billions of dollars to prop up aging whalers and insisting on its right to carry on traditional whaling, much like Norway, another major whaling nation.

Sea Shepherd tactics have highlighted wasteful public funding to support an industry that is fast becoming obsolete. The organisation’s campaign forced Japan to call off its scientific whaling in the Antarctic last March.

In his book “How to Catch Dolphins,” released in 2010, Prof. Yusuke Sekiguchi, a whaling researcher, says Japan’s dolphin catches are based on a culture where animals are caught, killed and eaten with gratitude to providence.

Naoko Koyama of the Institute of Biodiversity in Japan, a Kyoto-based non-government oganisation which is working to stop dolphins from being captured alive for aquariums, said the clash over Japanese culling has overtones of a clash between Japanese and Western cultures.

“As protestors we need to be able to avoid getting into this narrow debate,” she said.

Koyama’s small organisation of 15 members bases its campaign on spreading facts about the negative impact on wild mammals when imprisoned in aquariums for commercial profits.

“The results have been encouraging as the people who listen to us become supporters of our organisation,” she said.

Iwao Takayama, defence attorney for Vermeulen, said “foreign activists are talking of respecting the law, the basis for the victory in the lawsuit. But to buy respect in Japan, it is important to try to talk it out, preferably in Japanese.”

Takayama said prosecutors tried hard to present the case against Vermeulen as one between SSCS and the Japanese government. “It was obvious they resorted to this to appeal to Japanese sentiments,” he said.

(END)

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

The arrest and release of a Dutch activist in Japan has put in bad light this country’s refusal to heed international calls to limit traditional dolphin and whale hunting practices in favour of conservation.

“The arrest (of Erwin Vermeulen) was intended to intimidate us to leave Taiji (a fishing town where dolphins are corralled for mass slaughter),” said Scott West, director for investigations with the United States-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS).

“But the effect is the opposite as more volunteers are signing up to join our activities to stop dolphin and whale killing,” said West.

By sending foreign volunteers like Vermeulen to Taiji, SSCS has raised hackles in Japan, especially after it took a confrontational stance by publishing footage of bloody dolphin hunts in the southern Japan fishing town.

Taiji’s dolphin slaughters came under international glare in 2010 after a film on the annual ritual, titled ‘The Cove’, claimed the Academy Award for best documentary in that year.

While Vermeulen’s release on Feb. 22 proved that he had not pushed a guard on Dec. 16 as charged, activists say it did nothing to change deep-rooted attitudes to cetacean hunting in this country.

“Vermeulen won his case because he did not break the law. That does not mean anti-whalers have gained respect in Japan. The real test is whether the activists can stop Taiji from killing whales and dolphins,” said Kazue Suzuki, spokesperson for Greenpeace Japan.

While it is also opposed to whaling, Greenpeace Japan has distanced itself from Sea Shepherd’s confrontational approach, preferring to focus its campaign on issues such as mercury contamination of whale meat.

The local media portrays SSCS as an aggressive organisation, citing its use of laser beams and drones to harass whalers.

In a January editorial, ‘Japan Times’, a leading English language daily, accused the organisation of “crossing the line from peaceful protest and reasonable monitoring to violent confrontation that could harm a crew member on either side.”

But the controversy appears to be playing out in Sea Shepherd’s favour.

On Feb. 21 a federal court in Seattle denied an injunction sought by the Japanese Institute for Cetacean Research to restrain Sea Shepherd from carrying on its anti-whaling activities in the Antarctic Ocean.

Western countries, including the U.S. and Australia, that respect an International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on whaling, want Japan to stop its ‘scientific expeditions’.

While the IWC, under a 1987 decision, allows the killing of 1,000 whales in the Antarctic Ocean for research purposes, annually, much of the meat ends up being sold commercially.

Activists have, over many years, accused Japan of taking advantage of the IWC quota to persist with commercial whaling, endangering the mammals.

Japan is also being accused of spending billions of dollars to prop up aging whalers and insisting on its right to carry on traditional whaling, much like Norway, another major whaling nation.

Sea Shepherd tactics have highlighted wasteful public funding to support an industry that is fast becoming obsolete. The organisation’s campaign forced Japan to call off its scientific whaling in the Antarctic last March.

In his book “How to Catch Dolphins,” released in 2010, Prof. Yusuke Sekiguchi, a whaling researcher, says Japan’s dolphin catches are based on a culture where animals are caught, killed and eaten with gratitude to providence.

Naoko Koyama of the Institute of Biodiversity in Japan, a Kyoto-based non-government oganisation which is working to stop dolphins from being captured alive for aquariums, said the clash over Japanese culling has overtones of a clash between Japanese and Western cultures.

“As protestors we need to be able to avoid getting into this narrow debate,” she said.

Koyama’s small organisation of 15 members bases its campaign on spreading facts about the negative impact on wild mammals when imprisoned in aquariums for commercial profits.

“The results have been encouraging as the people who listen to us become supporters of our organisation,” she said.

Iwao Takayama, defence attorney for Vermeulen, said “foreign activists are talking of respecting the law, the basis for the victory in the lawsuit. But to buy respect in Japan, it is important to try to talk it out, preferably in Japanese.”

Takayama said prosecutors tried hard to present the case against Vermeulen as one between SSCS and the Japanese government. “It was obvious they resorted to this to appeal to Japanese sentiments,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Dec 29 2011 (IPS)

For the last ten years, environmentalists and marine biologists have repeatedly warned that the world’s tuna populations, and particularly bluefin tuna, are being overfished to the verge of extinction.

Marine biologist María José Juan Jordá at the Honolulu Fish Auction. Credit: Angkana Rawichutiwan

These complaints led ICCAT to admit in November that the system for monitoring catches, which until now relied on a paper-based reporting system, is prone to fraud and misinformation, and will be replaced with an electronic documentation system that will be tested in 2012.

Now a team of Spanish and Canadian marine biologists, headed up by María José Juan Jordá, has confirmed the threat of the collapse of tuna populations, through an analysis of the global populations of 26 tunas and related fish species.

In a recently released study, Juan Jordá and her co-authors concluded that the steepest declines have taken place in two groups: the largest, longest-lived, highest-value temperate tunas and the smaller, short-lived mackerels.

In the case of both groups, most of their populations are being overexploited to the verge of extinction, according to the study “Global Population Trajectories of Tunas and Their Relatives”, published in early December in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

“There is no need to cut down on fish consumption,” but consumers need to be well informed and should support industries that promote sustainable fishing practices, said Juan Jordá, a researcher at Universidade da Coruña in Spain and Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Q: The conclusions of your study confirm the warnings that have been voiced for years by environmental organisations. Which species are most affected? A: Our work confirms that various populations of temperate tunas are being overexploited, including the Atlantic bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) of the east, west and south Atlantic, and the albacore tuna (Thunnus alalunga) of the north Atlantic.

The current biomass of these species is at levels below what scientists consider to be safe, and rates of fishing mortality are higher than what is considered safe.

We also show that the majority of tropical tuna species are being “fully exploited.” In other words, the current levels of biomass and fishing mortality are “optimal” for most of these species.

I say optimal because the goal of the Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs), including ICCAT, which are responsible for the management and conservation of fish species, is to reduce the biomass of their populations to “maximum sustainable yield” levels.

Q: What does that mean? A: When the biomass of a species is reduced by a certain proportion – depending on the species and its particular biology, normally around 50 or 60 percent – the population reaches its most productive level, the optimal level for maximising catches. Basically, the tropical tuna species are close to the limits of sustainability.

Q: What are the most commercially attractive species? A: We’ve estimated that the biomass of temperate tunas (three species of bluefin tuna and one of albacore) declined by an average of 80 percent between 1954 and 2006. The biomass of tropical tunas (bigeye, yellowfin and skipjack) decreased 60 percent in the same period.

Global tuna catches in 2008 totaled 4.2 million tons, of which 94% correspond to tropical species, and only six percent to catches of temperate tunas, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

Most of these catches were by “relatively well” managed fisheries. However, there are problematic issues that urgently need to be addressed.

Q: Such as? A: With the growth in the world’s population, the demand for tuna and fishing activity has expanded. But neither the majority of fisheries nor their catches can continue growing, because tuna species are already “fully exploited” or “overexploited”.

One solution, which should be addressed by all of the RFMOs, is to reduce the number of boats and their capacity to take fish from the sea. Overexploited populations need recovery plans, and when plans do exist, like with the Atlantic bluefin tuna, it is essential that they be effective and enforced.

Other tools, such as listing species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, are also needed.

Q: Wouldn’t it also be necessary to change the way RFMOs determine “optimal” populations? A: Yes. The official goal of the RFMOs is to achieve the maximum sustainable yield. This is very easy in theory, but in practice it is very difficult to achieve, and even for scientists to estimate, because it requires good biological data on species and catches, which isn’t always available.

As a result, the reference levels estimated as targets for maximum sustainable yields are subject to a great deal of uncertainty. Therefore, the RFMOs should modify their goals and define new criteria, where there are limits set as reference points, in order to prevent overly low levels of biomass and overly high levels of mortality, and objective reference points, with safety margins.

Q: ICCAT has admitted that its system for the control of tuna fishing is ineffective and has pledged to reform it. Do you think that the countries involved have the political will to cut back on fishing and fish consumption? A: ICCAT took a very positive step in deciding to adopt an electronic system for documenting catches. But this step must be fulfilled, and high-quality, accurate data must be provided. This requires the cooperation of all of the countries involved in these fisheries.

This will mean short-term sacrifices, with medium- and long-term benefits, because if fishing is managed well and populations are recovered, it is good for the fishing industry, for fish populations, and for consumers.

Q: And what would be the ideal attitude on the part of consumers? A: There is no need to cut down on fish consumption in general, but we need good information, good product labeling, and to support industries that have adopted sustainable fishing practices and ecolabels, like those promoted by the Marine Stewardship Council.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

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By Lowana Veal
REYKJAVIK, Oct 6 2011 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama has decided to impose diplomatic rather than trade sanctions on Iceland because of the country’s whale-hunting activities.

He has implemented an instrument known as the Pelly Amendment, also known as Section 8 of the Fisherman’s Protective Act. This is a law from 1978 that allows the U.S. President to ban the import of products from countries that allow fishing operations or trade that diminish the effectiveness of an international fishery conservation programme for endangered or threatened species.

This was the upshot of a process initiated in December 2010, when 19 American NGOs filed a “Pelly petition” pursuant to the Pelly Amendment to call on the Secretaries of Commerce and Interior to certify that Iceland is undermining international conservation agreements. They called for the imposition of trade sanctions against fisheries-related businesses linked to the Iceland company which is responsible for killing fin whales.

Then U.S. secretary of commerce Gary Locke acted on this and certified in July that Iceland be subject to the Pelly Amendment because, as Obama put it in his letter to the Icelandic authorities, “Nationals of Iceland are conducting whaling activities that diminish the effectiveness of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) conservation programme.”

However, Locke recommended at the time that diplomatic sanctions rather than trade sanctions be implemented.

This means that American diplomats are supposed to voice their concerns about the continuation of commercial whaling by Iceland when on official visits; seek ways to stop whaling by Icelandic companies; and consider whether it is appropriate to continue cooperation in Arctic cooperation projects.

Obama’s letter also states: “Iceland’s increased commercial whaling and recent trade in whale products diminish the effectiveness of the IWC’s conservation programme because: (1) Iceland’s commercial harvest of whales undermines the moratorium on commercial whaling put in place by the IWC to protect plummeting whale stocks; (2) the fin whale harvest greatly exceeds catch levels that the IWC’s scientific body advised would be sustainable if the moratorium were removed; and (3) Iceland’s harvests are not likely to be brought under IWC management and control at sustainable levels through multilateral efforts at the IWC.”

Obama had 60 days to respond to Locke’s decision. In the intervening time, an Icelandic delegation visited Washington and met with the U.S. State Department and two Alaskan Senators to discuss the situation.

They emphasised that Iceland only conducts whaling from two abundant and healthy stocks in the North Atlantic, minke whales and fin whales, and that the whaling activities are fully sustainable and based on best scientific information.

But it appears that these talks came to no avail.

In response to Obama’s letter, the Icelandic Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture, Jon Bjarnason, expressed surprise and disappointment. “The U.S. authorities are not consistent when they criticise Iceland for its fin whale hunting on the one hand and ask for the support of Iceland and other member States of the International Whaling Commission for their bowhead quota off Alaska on the other hand. Scientific information clearly shows that the Icelandic fin whale hunting is no less sustainable than the U.S. bowhead whaling,” he said.

The five-year U.S. bowhead quota is subject to approval by a 75 percent majority of member countries of the IWC at its Annual Meeting in Panama in 2012.

Bjarnason’s ministry defended the Icelandic position by saying: “There is no legal or scientific justification for actions to be taken by the U.S. due to Icelandic whaling activities.” Furthermore, “Iceland’s whaling activities are fully lawful and its international trade in whale products is in accordance with its international obligations.”

While the ministry of fisheries was boldly trying to defend their position, other ministers had a slightly different view.

Minister for the Environment Svandis Svavarsdottir doubts if whaling in the present context can ever be called sustainable, both from the standpoint of the environment and judged by economic factors. “Foreign markets for whale meat are few and miniscule, making the potential income of whaling negligible in a larger economic context,” she says.

Minister for foreign affairs, Ossur Skarphedinsson makes a clear distinction between the minke and the fin whale catch. “Our policy is clear. We shall utilise our resources in a sustainable way. The fin whale stock in the northern seas is without doubt not endangered, and when the Americans state the contrary they unfortunately reflect a rather infantile command of the scientific facts,” he told IPS.

Skarphedinsson continued: “However, in the strict sense of the definition of sustainability it can be questioned if fin whales are utilised in a sustainable way if there doesn’t exist a market for the product, as stated by some respectable opponents of whaling. This has been recently discussed twice in the government and I have been asked in my dual capacity as minister of foreign affairs and foreign trade to produce a report, among other things on the market aspect, in cooperation with the minister of agriculture.

“We shall take it from there, although I add, that the recent action of the American government against Iceland is not helpful to speed that up. Indeed their arguments against Iceland are devoid of any scientific data, reflecting a rather questionable motive as well as methodology.”

“As far as the minke whale catch is concerned, it is scientifically impossible to argue that these are unsustainable, and only the American administration steps as low as to question our data on the minke catch without wanting to inspect the data. It is difficult to come to an accommodation with people that play by such twisted rules,” he added.

Although no fin whales have been caught this year because of declining demand for whale meat in Japan, some fin whale meat has been exported there. The American groups have also complained about that.

“Our source found that 572 tons of fin meat (and blubber) were imported in 2010 and 410 tons of meat have been imported this year,” says Nanami Kurasawa from the Japanese marine conservation organisation IKAN, adding: “Around 335 tons of meat is still in the bonded warehouse.”

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By IPS Correspondents
KIBBBUTZ MASHABEI SADEH, NEGEV DESERT, Jul 30 2011 (IPS)

“It wasn’t easy to convince people that growing fish in the desert makes sense,” reminisces marine biologist Samuel Appelbaum, peering through the opaque water where thousands of barramundi are being harvested.

Fishing in the desert. Credit: Pierre Klochendler/IPS.

Seemingly, because, for the past 14 years under Appelbaum’s guidance, local fish farmer Amit Ziv has been tending ponds stocked with the half-kilo carnivore specie. Twice a week, his team of desert fishermen dressed in diving suits haul their nets filled with one-and-a-half ton of the aquatic creature. The whole procedure takes about 20 minutes.

At the packing house, the fish catch is hosed with special icy water at minus three degrees Celsius. “Barramundi die of heart attack below 15 degrees,” explains the manager of the Deli-Dag fish farm. It’s then sorted by size and shipped around the country.

Once a biblical wilderness where Abraham wandered and watered his herd, the Negev has become a source – of money. Israeli scientists and farmers like Appelbaum and Ziv have developed an innovative way of raising tropical sea fish that makes use of warm brackish (slightly salty) water. Desert barramundi fetch 60 shekels (18 dollars) per kilo in the domestic boutique market.

Ziv’s clamour, “Desert fish on your plate, there’s nothing better than that!” may sounds like a promising auction, but the down-to-earth kibbutznik is selling no fishy patter. “Our fish is bred in an uncontaminated environment. Water is purified by sunlight and dehydrated air. There’s obviously no other aquatic species around. So it doesn’t catch any disease. Since organic fish is on high demand in industrial countries, we plan to export.”

The somewhat incongruous endeavour is the fruit of decades of research. Some 60 years ago, it became clear that a vast prehistoric thermal aquifer is actually nestled 700-metre deep in the womb of the unforgiving wasteland. But the naturally hot ocean of saline water was out of reach. Drilling the rocky underground was then too expensive.

Cheaper technologies were introduced during the 1960s. Geothermal water became economically viable. Nowadays, drilling a one-kilometre deep well costs the State company Mekorot around a million dollars. Effortlessly emerging at sea level, the 40-degree artesian water is pumped to the surface of the 200-metre high plateau, cooled and stored in fishponds at a constant temperature of 28 degrees.

“There are billions of cubic metres of water free of any pollutants, an ecological treasure-trove that’s sustainable for at least the next 100 years,” marvels Appelbaum. The fish physiologist at the Bengis Centre for Desert Aquaculture had first to convince himself that the water is good enough for growing fish, not just trees and vegetables. He finally concluded that the water is “physiologically wonderful.”

“Fish need water, but they’re unhappy in seawater salinity. The brackish water found here is 20 times less saline than marine water, yet five times saltier than fresh water.”

Seems out of place? “True, we have almost no rainfall here. For humans, desert means no water. The fish don’t mind, as long as there’s high-quality water laden with nitrates and ammonia – it contains 1,500mg chloride per litre – and good food. Oxygen dissolves better in water under dry conditions.

“We raise fish all year, and, with the heat, the breeding is intense,” Ziv adds. The Kibbutz produces 200 tons of fresh barramundi per year.

Nothing’s lost, nothing’s created. Ponds are covered like greenhouses to prevent evaporation. The brine is recycled up to six times before it’s circulated to irrigate the kibbutz’s jojoba orchards and olive groves that thrive on the chemicals produced by the fish excrements.”The metabolites that the fish excrete are an excellent diet for plants,” notes Ziv.

Moreover, the geothermal heat is used by the Kibbutz and by touristic spas of the area. “We’ve managed to create a combination of desert aquaculture and agriculture integrated in an ecosystem that’s not so unique after all,” chimes in the modest scientist.

“Take a problem and turn it into an asset”, has long been a national motto. The Negev makes up 60 percent of the land. The chronic shortage of water has forced Israelis to think out of the box. “If you live in an area which is aplenty with natural resources, you worry less,” reckons Appelbaum.

“Here, either you say, ‘To hell, I give up, I leave’, or you decide, ‘I’m staying, but I’ll find a solution.’ The drive is to want to make life livable in the desert. You make use of whatever resources you discover.”

Israel’s founding pioneers wanted to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy in the Bible, to make the desert bloom. Appelbaum doesn’t share this vision. “I don’t want to conquer and change the desert. I’d like to keep it untouched, a pure beauty. I just want to love it, live in it, with it, and from it.”

Development in the Negev might once again become not just lucrative but strategic patriotism, were this already tiny country with available land as scarce as water to withdraw from occupied territories for peace with the Palestinians and Syria.

National rights to water – in the West Bank (and below it, to its aquifer) and in the more fertile Golan Heights (and below it, to the Lake of Galilee’s northeast tip) – have been contentious issues of past negotiations.

The scientist-cum-pioneer lays out his personal, more global, vision: “The whole planet is 40 percent barren – lands which are considered poor, useless, cursed. It’s wrong. Let’s think fruitfully,” urges Appelbaum.

“Contrary to such stigma, sparsely inhabited arid lands are unspoiled and conceal resources. The technology is simple and can be applied wherever there’s an aquifer. Fish like clean water and sunlight. Deserts can become oceans for fish, sources of food production for all the nations of the world.”

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By Cam McGrath
ALEXANDRIA, Jul 11 2011 (IPS)

Ali Mohsen knows how to tell a good fish story. The wiry, white-haired Egyptian mariner weaves a yarn about his childhood days when the sea was so full of fish that one could simply dangle a hand net over the side of the boat and pull up a seafood dinner. This morning, his crew spent hours out at sea with only four kilos of small fish to show for it.

Egyptian fishermen are using increasingly fine nets to catch scarce fish. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

“They’re ruining the market for all of us,” he says. “If you catch baby fish, they’re not worth much, but it will keep them from growing to be adult fish and reproducing to make more fish.”

Egypt’s natural fisheries have been in decline since the late 1990s. According to the General Authority for Fisheries Resources Development (GAFRD), the state agency responsible for managing Egypt’s fisheries, Mediterranean fishermen landed 81,000 tonnes of finfish in 2009, a 10 percent decrease from the previous year. Unpublished reports indicate the 2010 catch was even lower.

Diminishing returns have given fishermen more incentive to use illegal and destructive techniques to maintain their meagre incomes. The preferred methods of poaching, according to GAFRD, involve the use of mist nets, floodlights to attract fish at night, dynamite and various fast-acting poisons.

“Some fishermen throw large amounts of insecticide powder into the water and wait a few minutes for the dead fish to float to the surface,” Mohsen explains. “Can you imagine what happens to people who eat these poisoned fish?”

Catching poachers is extremely difficult. While Mediterranean ports are tightly controlled, the vast expanse of sea that buttresses Egypt’s northern coast is beyond police purview.

The coast guard vessels that patrol these waters are on the look out for Israeli naval vessels and illegal arms shipments to Gaza. Catching a boatload of local fishermen dragging a mist net over a shoal is not a priority, nor within their jurisdiction.

“Authorities only control the landing area,” says marine biologist Alaa El-Haweet, a GAFRD consultant. “There is no control out at sea, or in the market… so fishermen can basically catch as much as they want, wherever they want.”

The government limits its regulation to licensing the 4,000 fishing vessels and 40,000 unmotorised boats that ply Egypt’s Mediterranean waters. Port authorities randomly inspect boats for permits and mandatory safety equipment, but rarely bother to search for illegal fishing tackle. Even then, infractions are usually overlooked with a small bribe.

In recent years, the government has also imposed an annual 45-day moratorium on Mediterranean fisheries aimed at protecting wild stocks. Most commercial fleet owners use the May 1 to June 15 period to perform annual maintenance on their boats, which are forbidden from leaving port during the moratorium.

“The ban coincides with the spawning season for 20 (commercially) important species of fish,” explains El-Haweet. “Actually, the spawning season lasts three months, but we couldn’t make the ban any longer because fishermen have to feed their families.”

Fisheries officials say they faced ferocious resistance when they attempted to enforce the moratorium earlier this year. The uprising that forced Hosni Mubarak from power in February is said to have distorted prices and pushed fishermen deeper into poverty, heightening their contempt of regulatory powers. When protests by angry fishermen turned violent, GAFRD decided to abandon the fishing ban altogether.

Madani Ali Madani, a fisheries specialist at GAFRD, says unregulated fishing during the critical spawning season will augment fish production this season, but could harm wild stocks for years to come.

“We tried to clarify that the ban was for their benefit, but fishermen have used the opportunity of the revolution to disobey all regulations,” Madani told IPS. “Some told us they wouldn’t stop fishing because they were using long lines, which they claim do not affect spawning fish. Then the purse seiners said they wouldn’t stop if the long liners didn’t, and the trawlers followed the purse seiners, and so on.”

While commercial fishermen have reportedly targeted fish congregating over their spawning grounds, Madani denies rumours that the absence of authority following Mubarak’s departure prompted a large number of boat captains to switch to mist nets.

“A fishing net is one of the most expensive items in any fishing operation,” he says. “Usually a boat that has a net will use it until it is completely destroyed in about two to four years. We’ve seen no evidence of fishermen changing their gear early.”

However one veteran fisher, who gave his name as Gomaa, told IPS that since the revolution five months ago Egypt’s Mediterranean coastal waters have become a “battle zone.” Competing captains are using mist nets, long-lines, bottom trawling and other destructive fishing methods to land a larger catch.

And while Gomaa acknowledges the damage that these methods cause, he says he too will resort to them if his catch continues to decline.

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By Julio Godoy
BERLIN, Apr 10 2011 (IPS)

In the 1970s, French oyster breeders introduced the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) to the Bay of Biscay to diversify the area’s species and develop the commercial oyster industry.

The Pacific oyster Credit: Llez – Creative Commons license

Also known as the Japanese oyster or Miyagi oyster, the Pacific oyster differs from the European flat oyster (Ostrea edulis) in that its valves are narrower and curved and its flavour is more distinctive. Thanks to its hardy constitution it has made itself at home in the seas of northern Europe, competing with and displacing local species.

But unlike other invasions of exotic species, it seems that the Pacific oyster invasion has created new opportunities for other species and contributed to diversifying the fauna and flora of the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea.

“The Pacific oyster acclimatised perfectly to our region,” said Achim Wehrmann, a geologist from the Department of Marine Research at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Wilhelmshaven, some 300 kilometres northwest of Berlin on the German coast of the Wadden Sea (Wattenmeer, in German).

The Wadden Sea, which lies between the Frisian Islands, the North Sea and the coasts of the Netherlands, German and Denmark, is an intertidal zone forming a shallow body of water with wetlands and tidal flats, which can be crossed by foot when the tide is out. Its floor, visible for several hours a day, is rich in nutrients and home to thousands of species.

According to Wehrmann, the Pacific oyster was identified in the Wadden Sea for the first time in 1998. Thirteen years later, around 15,000 tons of the oyster are harvested here every year.

The Pacific oyster’s migration revolutionised regional habitats.

“At the beginning of the invasion, the Asian oyster was content with occupying the areas of the Wadden Sea that are temporarily underwater,” explained biologist Christian Buschbaum, who works for the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, close to Wilhelmshaven.

But as timed passed, the Pacific oyster migrated to the areas permanently underwater, the native habitat of the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis), also known as the common mussel. Because Pacific oysters form clusters of hundreds of individual oysters, grow more rapidly, and are bigger than the local mussels, they came to outnumber them.

However, “curiously, this invasion has not provoked any major harmful effects,” Buschbaum told Tierramérica.

“The local species accepted it. Although the oysters and mussels both feed on plankton, and now compete for it, the two species coexist well. The local mussel is a bit smaller than it was before the arrival of Crassostrea gigas, but, other than that, there have been no other negative impacts,” he said.

Moreover, the Asian shellfish brought with it a type of algae known as Japanese brown seaweed (Sargassum muticum), which has also spread throughout the North Atlantic and Baltic Sea.

The exotic algae has become a source of food for Haliichthys taeniophorus – a fish from the same family as seahorses – which for many years was considered to be threatened with extinction, added Buschbaum.

Nevertheless, Wehrmann cautioned that “the speed with which this oyster reproduces is a problem. Another problem is that it can be dangerous for humans,” he told Tierramérica.

The oyster’s valves have very sharp edges and can cause painful cuts to tourists who walk barefoot during low tide, as well as to unaccustomed consumers.

“At the institute we are studying the oyster’s heavy metal content and other pathogenic risks, especially in terms of cholera, to develop parameters for comparison with other species,” explained Wehrmann.

Until now, the studies conducted have not uncovered any risks, although European health authorities have still not authorised their consumption as food, he added.

The growth of the Pacific oyster population contrasts with the fate of its local cousin, the European flat oyster, which is “very close to extinction” as a result of diseases, overharvesting, and the spread of the Pacific oyster itself, said Karin Dubsky of the environmental organisation Coastwatch Europe.

While Ostrea edulis is of no particular environmental importance, its protection “is a moral issue,” she said.

“Just as the whole world is concerned about the fate of the panda, the survival of the European flat oyster should be protected as well,” she stressed.

The fate of Ostrea edulis is shared by many other oyster species across the globe. According to an article published in February in BioScience journal, 85 percent of oyster reefs worldwide have been lost over recent decades.

An international research team led by marine biologist Michael Beck of the University of California, Santa Cruz examined oyster reefs across 144 bays and 44 ecoregions around the world. They concluded that oyster reefs in most bays (70 percent) and ecoregions (63 percent) are at less than 10 percent of their former abundance, based on comparisons with records from between 130 to 20 years ago.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

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