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  Our Ravaged Seas: Globalization Is Destroying the World's Oceans

Our Ravaged Seas Globalization Is Destroying the World's Oceans

By Thomas Schulz

Part 3: Pirate Fishermen and Big Multinationals

Unlike Norwegians or Icelanders, EU fishermen are not involved in the negotiations. Politicians and bureaucrats get together to set the quotas.

In 2007, German fishermen were allotted 225,000 tons. The quota, which belongs to the German government and not the fishermen, is essentially lent to them.

In Iceland, as in many other fishing nations, this is handled differently. The Icelandic quota is owned by the fishermen, which gives them competitive advantages when it comes to planning and securing financing. Icelandic fishing companies have expanded for years, buying up bigger and bigger fleets and increasing their market share.

Deutsche Fischfang Union, based in the northern German port city of Cuxhaven, was once Germany's largest deep-sea fishing company. Today it belongs to Samherji, an Icelandic company, which also owns fleets in Poland, England and Spain. A slow but constant wave of consolidations has rolled across the fishing industry for years. The number of players is decreasing, but those that remain are getting bigger, more global and more powerful. This is bad news for the millions of small family fishing operations. Today, one percent of the world fishing fleet is already responsible for 50 percent of the catch.

Last summer Samherji acquired a fleet of six factory ships just so that it could fish the West African coast. The EU pays Mauritania more than €80 million ($122 million) a year so European industrial fishing companies can drain the African coastal waters of fish. In many cases, this doesn't leave Mauritanian fisherman with enough to make a living. Others, like the Dutch fishing corporation Parlevliet & Van de Plas, are already sending their ships to locations deep in the South Atlantic and off the coasts of Chile and Peru.

More and more often, the global struggle for dwindling resources is turning violent. French longline fishermen are attacking Spanish drift net fishermen with Molotov cocktails, accusing them of depleting their fishing grounds. English fishermen have taken to throwing frozen fish at Icelandic coast guard vessels. And German stake-net fishermen are at each other's throats in the Baltic for fishing too close to one another.

But at least all can agree that they have one common enemy: pirate fishermen. They catch without licenses, without quotas and without paying any heed to a global fisheries policy designed to preserve populations. The so-called IUU, or "illegal, unregistered and unregulated" fishing industry, already pulls about one third of the world's annual catch from the sea.

"Unfortunately the IUU is in fact out of control in some areas," says Stefán Ásmundsson. He is the chairman of the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC), whose members include the EU and most of the other countries that fish in this ocean region. Similar multinational organizations also exist in other ocean regions. They represent an attempt to manage fishing in largely unregulated international waters. This only works if countries abide by the rules, but many don't.

"The problem is that, under international maritime law, enforcing the rules is up to the flag state of the fishermen," says Ásmundsson. And many deliberately enforce no rules at all. More than 1,200 fishing trawlers are registered under flags of convenience -- Cambodia, say, or Honduras. Another 1,600 trawlers, the pirate fishermen, sail the oceans under no flags at all.

Many pirate fishermen are known and their ships are on blacklists. But in international waters they can simply forbid inspectors from coming on board.

This is why the international community is increasingly trying to forbid the pirates access to ports, make it impossible for them to unload their fish, and deny them food and diesel fuel. But even these sanctions don't always work.

The five biggest trawlers owned by Piro-Fisch, a German-Russian charter company, were long known as impudent pirates when they entered the port of Rostock in northeastern Germany in the fall of 2005. They are on all relevant blacklists. But the ships remained untouched -- despite the fact that even the Icelandic foreign minister asked the EU Commission to prevent them from leaving the port. The trawlers left Rostock in March 2006, unobstructed and with their supplies on board. In April, after another raid, they entered the Russian seaport of Kaliningrad, where they were promptly detained.

Even in legal fishery, politicians often fail to live up to their responsibility. The EU's cod quotas, for example, are still 50 percent higher than the catch volumes scientists consider barely justifiable. Sharp disputes keep erupting in the EU because some countries, instead of fishing less, push to have their quotas raised.

The problem stems from the fact that in traditionally strong fishing nations, like France and Spain, no politicians want to alienate whole coastal regions. The recommendations of experts, like those with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, are all too often ignored. In the world struggle for resources, fish are usually the losers.

Many German fishermen are now searching for environmentally justifiable methods, to avoid being vilified as "fish murderers" or "environmental pigs" -- the sorts of names they are repeatedly called on coastal esplanades. For more than five years, the German fishing industry and seafood retailers have supported the Marine Stewardship Council's eco-label, which identifies seafood caught legally and in an environmentally responsible way.

There is also a growing trend to provide more exact details about the origin of fish, such as whether halibut was caught off the coast of Iceland or Norway. This can make a big difference, because a fish species can be virtually wiped in one ocean region while flourishing in another.

In addition, organizations like the NEAFC are attempting to establish an international monitoring regime. But the oceans are enormous and there are few inspectors.

Germany has three fisheries protection vessels to monitor its territorial waters in the North Sea and Baltic Sea, as well as to take part in international patrol to places as far away as the Arctic and Canada.

Monitoring on the High Seas

Shortly before midnight, the "Seeadler" slips out of a naval base near Warnemünde on the Baltic Sea. The German authorities have learned that dozens of Polish fishermen, who exceeded their quotas long ago, are on their way to German territorial waters. When the ship reaches the open sea, its main diesel engines roar into action as the massive, 72-meter (236-foot) coastguard ship heads toward the island of Usedom at full speed. But by the next morning there are no Poles in sight. False alarm.

Instead, the "Seeadler" has set its sights on a Danish trawlnet cutter. The inspectors could force the fishermen to haul in their net for inspection immediately, but not without reason. "We don't want to obstruct fishing," says Raik Thomas, the Seeadler's captain. On its tours through the Baltic, each lasting about two weeks, the unarmed "Seeadler" typically completes about 30 inspections.

The Danish ship agrees to bring in its net, voluntarily, and then things move very quickly. Four men put on survival suits and jump into an escort speedboat, which is suspended from a crane above the "Seeadler' deck. Within seconds the inflatable boat is hoisted overboard and dropped the last few meters, hitting the water with a slapping noise. It rushes across the gray waves of the Baltic toward the 15-meter (49-foot) cutter, blue light flashing through the drizzling rain and spray.

The German inspectors have hardly stepped on board before the net emerges from the water. A sack full of plaice and codfish gasping for air hangs above the deck, gills wide open and their mouths pushing through the mesh. The fishermen and inspectors wade, knee-deep at times, through 150 kilos of fish flapping around on the deck. The "Seeadler" team inspects nets and mesh sizes, licenses, fish species and the bycatch. It takes all of 45 minutes for the Germans to give the "Line Charlotte" a seal of approval. "In truth, we rarely run into any problems," says Captain Thomas.

But environmental groups like Greenpeace disagree. They argue the inspections are inadequate. According to Greenpeace officials, too much of what happens on the ocean goes unpunished, and worldwide fishing capacities should be reduced by 50 percent. Greenpeace wants to see conservation zones where fishing is banned altogether in many ocean regions.

Greenpeace repeatedly tries to deliver at least symbolic messages. This is the case as the "Rainbow Warrior II" sails in the Mediterranean near Naples in the midsummer heat. Its goal is to address one of the most dramatic chapters in the overfishing debate -- the threat of eradication of bluefin tuna. Mediterranean fishermen made a living catching the predatory fish for two millennia, but now it has all but disappeared from the region.

The craving for sushi is the main reason behind this threat to the tuna population. Nowadays some are even willing to pay more than $100,000 (€65,000) for special specimens. The tuna business alone turns over €4 billion ($6.1 billion) in annual revenues.

The combination of high profits and illegal methods has attracted the underworld, too. The Japanese and the Italian mafia are believed to be deeply involved in the tuna business. Horror stories are making the rounds in the fishing community about EU fisheries inspectors who found return air tickets in their hotel rooms upon arriving in Sicily, or the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) activist who found a white lily on her bed -- a mafia death threat.

The tuna farms that have begun to appear off many Mediterranean coasts in recent years also play a growing role in the industry. Young fish caught in the wild are fattened in farms until they're big enough for slaughter. Many of these farms are operated illegally. "It usually isn't clear who exactly is behind these operations. In many cases they are backed by bogus companies," says Alessandro Gianni, a fisheries biologist on board the Rainbow Warrior.

'It looks like "The Swarm" Down Here'

For documentation purposes, Gianni wants to send a diving team into a farm off the Neapolitan coast. But before the Greenpeace boats can reach the underwater cages, they are surrounded by the Italian coast guard. Nevertheless, the Greenpeace team decides to make the dive.

Three men disappear into a cage, where thousands of tuna are crowded together, frantically swimming around in a circle. Even the experienced divers are outraged. "It looks like 'The Swarm' down here," one of them calls out.

Despite such excesses, fish farms could be the salvation of worldwide fish population. Aquaculture, or artificially raising fish and seafood, is one of the world's fastest-growing forms of food production. The industry has grown by an average of 10 percent a year since the early 1990s.

Scientists are already alluding to a "blue revolution" similar to the "green revolution" in agriculture in the 1950s, when new methods quadrupled food production within a short period of time.

A little less than a third of the 1.2 million tons of farmed salmon sold worldwide comes from the farms of the Norwegian company Marine Harvest, the world's largest fish producer, with 7,500 employees in 18 countries. "It won't stay that way," says Leif Frode Onarheim, the company's acting president and CEO. "We have big ambitions."

Marine Harvest's model salmon farm is about an hour by boat from Stavanger, a city on Norway's west coast. A small red, wooden building and 14 cages, each of them 24 meters (79 feet) long, 24 meters wide and 30 meters (98 feet) deep, float in a fjord that is 400 meters (1,312 feet) deep. The cages contain 800,000 salmon, at a market value of about €10 million ($15.3 million).

Salmon are relatively easy to farm. They are well developed by the time they hatch, and they can be fed with industrially produced dry feed, which consists primarily of fish meal. Onarheim is convinced that successes with salmon can be repeated with other species, such as halibut, the South American tilapia and red snapper. The industry is also becoming more adept at dealing with the environmental problems of fish farming.

It takes one year to grow the fish from 100 grams (3.5 oz.) to five kilos (11 lbs.), when they are ready for slaughter. The salmon are pumped out of the cages and into transport ships, which take them to the processing factory at the other end of the fjord. A counter that hangs above the slaughtering machinery provides a running tally of the number of salmon that have been processed on a given day. The red digital numbers change every few seconds: 7,904, 7,905. It is only 11 a.m.

But for Onarheim this is still not fast enough. "We compete with chicken and beef," he says. He wants to see the farms enlarged, producing more and increasingly farther out to sea. Onarheim envisions annual production levels of two or three million fish -- per farm.

This is the reverse of the world of the northern German Pinkis brothers, for whom all of this must be lunacy -- the Pinkis brothers, with their daily catch of 30 or 40 cod, lined up in crates on their garden wall, between rosebushes and a neatly trimmed lawn. A kilo of the Pinkis's codfish sells for €2.50 ($3.83), cheaper than a Big Mac. The Pinkis brothers, who pluck each fish individually from the net and work at temperatures as low as -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit), when it's so cold that the codfish are frozen to the net.

No, says Klaus Pinkis, fish will not die out on their account. The brothers have trouble understanding why the people "over in Brussels," the ones who set the quotas, make their lives so difficult. Why can't they just be allowed to fish, without all the rules and regulations? They would know when to stop, would know the right amount of fishing so that both sides, the fisherman and the fish, could survive.

"It's such a wonderful profession, and I don't regret it for a minute," says Pinkis. "But I can't say whether anyone will be doing it after us."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan