The Catch: How Fishing Companies Reinvented Slavery and Plunder the Oceans PDF
Preview The Catch: How Fishing Companies Reinvented Slavery and Plunder the Oceans
.d e vre se r sth g ir llA .sse rP a w A .4 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C .d e vre se r sth g ir llA .sse rP a w A .4 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C 2 .d e vre se r sth g ir llA .sse rP a w A .4 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C 3 .d e vre se r sth g ir llA .sse rP a w A .4 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C 4 Karakia hi tuna, hi ika hoki To the thousands of nameless people who brave the seas to feed us, to their families who anxiously await their return, and to those who grieve for the ones who never come home. Taku aho nei, ka tangi wiwini. Taku aho nei, ka tangi wawana. Taku aho nei, ka hinga, ka mate ra. Kai mai, kai mai, e te kōkopu, Ki taku nei mōunu nei. Tara wiwini, tara wawana, .d Kia ai he whakataunga mau e vre se r sth Ki te uru ti, ki te makau. g ir llA .sse Tara wiwini, tara wawana, rP a w A .4 E tuapeka ki Wai-korire. 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C 5 Prayer used in catching eels or fish My fishing line here, its cry is awesome. My fishing line here, its cry is dreadful. My fishing line here, it is dropped, it sinks there. Bite here, bite here, O you kōkopu, Bite here at my bait. Awesome point, dreadful point, That allows you to be landed By the sharp point, by the hook. Awesome point, dreadful point, Which will deceive at Wai-korire. .d e vre se r sth gir llA A definition of modern slavery .sse rP A person is forced to work, held through fraud, under a w A .4 1 0 threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. He 2 © th g iryp o C 6 or she cannot walk away from their job without dire consequences to them or their families. ‘I was a slave, but then I became useless to the Koreans so they sent me home with nothing’ – Ruslan, an Indonesian crewman on fishing boat Melilla 203 .d e vre se r sth g ir llA .sse rP a w A .4 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C 7 Preface I felt peckish. It had been a long ride in a car with a decidedly surly driver and little to eat. Now there was time to kill before my flight. The food hall at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi offered the full range of Indian fast foods but they were a bit hefty for the occasion. I wanted something light. The ubiquitous McDonald’s offered Filet-O-Fish. It would fit the bill in the ten minutes before the Mumbai flight boarded. My selection was not unusual: fish makes up nearly 16 percent of the total human intake of animal protein. On average, every person on the planet eats 17 kilograms of fish a year. Globally, fish provides more than one and a half billion people with almost 20 percent of their average per capita intake of animal protein, and three billion people with at least 15 percent. In short, fishing is mighty important to the 1 human race. Modern-day fishing in the oceans is like Buffalo Bill blasting .d evre away at bison in the American West: the supply seems ser sth endless but is in fact diminishing towards the point of gir llA extinction for many key species. Over 140 million tonnes of .sse fish are taken each year, of which around 115 million tonnes rP go directly to human consumption and the rest to industrial a w A processes creating food products, some of it to feed other fish. .4 1 0 2 © th g iryp o C 8 The supply chain that had delivered the fish for my Filet-O- Fish to an airport in India was long and convoluted. Few McDonald’s customers, having a snack while waiting for a flight, could hope to know (if they were even interested) who had caught the fish, much less how it had been processed. It is also highly unlikely they would know anything about the species or whether the fish had been sustainably harvested, so it would be impossible for them to make an ethical or considered choice. All of us would be entirely dependent on the moral considerations, if any, that McDonald’s may have taken account of. The fine print on the box said the fish was hoki. The fish’s Latin name, Macruronus novaezelandiae, was not included, but had it been it would have revealed the fish’s origins. This barely known species of fish, processed and sold in vast quantities around the world, is, as this book will show, hauled out of cold waters off New Zealand’s South Island, sometimes by underpaid or barely paid men from poor areas of Asia. Wild fishing is labour-intensive. Everything on a vessel, from shooting the net to processing the fish and packing it, requires human hands. After a fish hits the pound below the trawling deck, lines of men quickly cut off its head and tail, gut the .de rest, pack and snap-freeze it. These men may have been on vre se the job for longer than any factory worker on land would be. r sthg They will be cold and wet. Some will be seasick, and all will ir llA .sse be tired and sore. Their workplace will be crowded and noisy; rP depending on the seas, it will also move violently and without a w A warning, throwing them into walls, into each other, and .4 10 sometimes even into machinery used to process the fish. 2 © th g iryp o C 9 They will also be expected to paint and maintain the boat, not an easy job for it will probably be an ageing rust bucket. Their meals may consist of damaged hoki. On some fishing boats even fresh damaged fish will be a luxury. In 2013 in Whangarei I came across Spanish fishing boats whose Indonesian crew had been fed ‘bait fish’ – frozen mackerel and squid – for 60 days straight. Meanwhile, the officers on the boat had been eating wholesome Spanish meals. At some point the frozen hoki will be shipped to China, South Korea or Thailand. There it will be semi-thawed so that further cheap labour can cut it down into fillets – or cellphone-sized pieces to stick inside buns. No longer really fish at that point, it has become the end point of a supply chain that often relies, for its economic viability, on paying workers as little as possible, and sometimes nothing at all. Then there is the other question: has the hoki been caught sustainably? Or is it destined to go the way of many other fish 2 species? A couple of months later, I attend a family celebration at an eye-wateringly expensive Japanese restaurant in Auckland. .de The restaurant’s set menu is designed to make pescetarians vre se happy. Environmentalists would be less so. One course offers r sth Antarctic toothfish from the Ross Sea. Eating Antarctic g ir llA toothfish, one of the most expensive fish sold anywhere, is the .sserP maritime equivalent of eating tiger. This is a fish that no one a w has ever needed in order to sustain life. Only recently A .4 10 identified, it may, however, be required to stay in the ocean to 2 © th maintain the balance of life on the planet. g iryp o C 10
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