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.

Trinidad's artisanal fishers have welcomed the ban on shrimp trawling. Credit: Courtesy of Fundación Proteger/IPS

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Sep 18 2013 (IPS)

Dianne Christian Simmons recalls the days when she would head out with her husband on fishing expeditions in the Gulf of Paria, a 3,000-square-mile shallow inland sea between Trinidad and Tobago and the east coast of Venezuela.

“We would come back with at least five barrels filled with fishes,” Christian Simmons, the president of the Fish Market Association, told IPS. “Now if we are able to fill one, it is a miracle.”"What you are doing is killing your future catch of shrimp." -- Gary Aboud of Fishermen and Friends of the Sea

Gary Aboud, an environmental activist and secretary of a local group called the Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS), blames the industrial shrimp trawlers, which he says use methods banned in many countries, for creating “deserts” in Trinidad and Tobago’s territorial waters.

Aboud said that as far back as 1996, the U.S.-based World Resources Institute was warning that shrimp trawling was comparable to dynamite fishing in terms of sustainability.

“In other words, shrimp trawling kills everything. Shrimp trawling is the most destructive and unsustainable type of fishing in the world,” he told IPS, applauding the decision earlier this month by the government to ban trawling in local waters.

Minister of Food Production Devant Maharaj, worried at the declining seafood stocks and the environmental damage associated with shrimp trawling, said the government is considering an amendment of the Fisheries Act to give teeth to the new measures.

He said a committee would be appointed to consider a “relief package” for displaced fishers who will be affected by the ban.

Late last year, the president of the Trinidad and Tobago Trawlers Association, Shaffi Mohammed, said his members were prepared to call it quits if the government came up with an adequate compensation package. The group, which has vigorously protested the ban, now has until Oct. 26 to submit a proposal on sustainable fisheries management to the government.

Christian Simmons believes the estimated 5,000 people working in the industry must accept the necessity of halting the outdated mode of catching shrimp.

“We are not saying to stop catching shrimp, we are saying to change your method. There are other more sustainable methods of catching shrimp,” she added.

Trawling involves the manual or mechanised towing of a “trawl net” through the water or along the sea bed. Nets vary in size but can span tens of feet and run behind the boat for miles (drift nets), indiscriminately dredging the water and sea bed.

“This state of affairs has resulted in serious conflicts amongst competing fishers and has also been used by environmentalists as compelling justification for immediate and strong action to be taken to address trawling activities,” Maharaj said.

Aboud told IPS the nets attached to the industrialised trawlers are heavily weighed down and dig deep into the seabed, capturing everything.

“The depth they are fishing at and the fact that they are such large and powerful vessels, they cover an area the size of 50 football fields in a day. That is a lot of desert they are creating so the destruction is immense,” he added.

He said the nets also capture minnows and juvenile fish, resulting in a drastic reduction in the fish population.

“So what you are doing is killing your future catch of shrimp,” he said. “You are also killing the food source of all the other fishes.”

Studies have shown that Trinidad and Tobago has the highest rate of discard of babies caught compared to any other part of the world, he added.

“We have 14.73 pounds of babies caught and discarded for every one pound of shrimp,” Aboud said, adding that sea grass, which provides shelter and food for small fish, is also destroyed.

The practice has been banned or restricted in several countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada and Malaysia.

A major proportion of the discards includes commercially important species, such as carite, king fish, snappers and groupers, Maharaj said. As a result, he noted, “Conflicts have arisen between artisanal and non-artisanal trawl fishers concerning habitat destruction resulting from the dragging of the trawl gears on the sea bed during trawling operations.”

Aboud believes that an environmentally friendly way of catching shrimp without disturbing the environment would be the use of shrimp pots, small traps that resemble wire cages.

The president of the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Fisher-folk (TTUF), Peter Glodon, sent a letter to Maharaj stressing that the 52,000 artisanal fishers of the twin-island state welcomed the crackdown on shrimp trawling, which has “completely destroyed the ‘battalie’ species of turtles in the Columbus Channel and many more species are on the brink of extinction”.

But he said that the ban should not be only for industrial trawlers, but should cover the “semi-industrial and the artisanal fleet that indulge in shrimp trawling”.

“By not doing so you will hasten the collapse of the fishing industry. Whether big medium or small, they all contribute to the mauling of juveniles,” he wrote.

Antarctic Ocean Alliance activists outside the Russian Embassy in Berlin. Credit: Courtesy of George Torode

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Apr 24 2013 (IPS)

Everyone loves penguins, but few will know that Thursday is World Penguin Day. Fewer still are those who know penguins are threatened with extinction by climate change and giant fishing trawlers from Europe and Asia stalking the oceans around Antarctica.

Penguins are a protected species, but the factory-sized trawlers are vacuuming up the tiny shrimp-like krill that are their main food source. The Southern Ocean is also becoming increasingly acidic from emissions of fossil fuels and will have a significant impact on krill populations."It's absurd. We're going to the ends of the world to find the last few fish." -- Greenpeace's Thilo Maack

And yet efforts to create two marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean have been blocked by China, Russia and Norway.

A network of protected areas was supposed to be established last year but the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) failed to reach a consensus, said Donna Mattfield of the Antarctic Ocean Alliance, a coalition of 30 scientific and environmental organisations.

All 25 CCAMLR member nations had committed to establishing a network but could not agree on marine protected area (MPA) proposals for East Antarctica, and the Ross Sea. They previously agreed to one small MPA in the South Orkney Islands, Mattfield told IPS.

“There’s no scientific justification for not going ahead with the MPAs,” she said noting that less than two percent of the world’s oceans are under any kind of protective management.

The proposed MPAs cover several million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean with a combination of multiple use MPAs and no-take marine reserves. A final decision on these MPAs will come at a special CCAMLR meeting in Bremerhaven, Germany in July.

“The Southern Ocean is under increasing pressure from climate change and resource extraction, but areas such as the Ross Sea and East Antarctica are amongst the least impacted, healthiest, and most beautiful oceans in the world. They are one of the last remaining wildernesses on the planet and deemed a necessary ‘living laboratory’ by scientists”, said Onno Gross, a marine biologist and director of Deepwave, an ocean conservation NGO.

Of the world’s 18 penguin species, 13 are now so threatened they need special protection. In the last few years, factory trawlers have made their way to the remote Southern Ocean to catch krill for the fast-growing trade to supply krill as fish meal for farmed salmon.

More recently, krill are being used to supply the booming health food and pharmaceutical markets for omega-3 three fatty acids believed to prevent heart disease and inflammatory conditions such as arthritis.

“Omega-3 three fatty acids can be obtained from plants. We don’t need them from fish,” says Thilo Maack of Greenpeace.

Europeans are subsidising the construction of supertrawlers that are plundering the oceans off West Africa and now the Southern Ocean because there aren’t enough fish left in European waters, Maack told IPS.

He knows of at least two German-built supertrawlers that are fishing krill. “It’s absurd. We’re going to the ends of the world to find the last few fish. We haven’t learned from our mistakes,” he said.

CCAMLR has set a krill quota of 400,000 tonnes and some 50 trawlers now ply the cold and dangerous waters. Just last week in the Ross Sea, a Chinese supertrawler caught fire and its crew of nearly 100 had to rescued. Luckily the trawler did not leak its thousand tonnes of diesel fuel.

Not a great deal is known about Antarctic krill populations. They are believed to exist in the hundreds of millions of tonnes. However the Southern Ocean is undergoing rapid changes. Krill larvae feed on algae living on the bottom of sea ice, which is rapidly dwindling around the Antarctic Peninsula with rising temperatures.

According to one estimate, the number of krill in the Southern Ocean may have dropped by 80 percent since the 1970s.

CO2 emissions from fossil fuels has made seawater is 30 percent more acidic than 50 years ago. These acid waters weaken or dissolve the shells of many creatures like sea snails. This is already happening in parts of the Southern Ocean. Krill will also be affected especially as acidification worsens with more CO2 emissions, says Maack.

Without major emissions cuts, large parts of the Southern Ocean will be too acidic for shell-forming species, including most plankton and krill, by 2040, oceanographer Carol Turley from Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK previously told IPS.

“We are hoping Germany as host of the special CCAMLR meeting in July will push China, Russia and Norway into agreeing to the two proposed MPAs,” Maack said.

There is a lot riding on this decision Mattfield believes. “It’s an opportunity to create the biggest protected area in history,” she said.

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.