Poverty & Plunder There is a serious North-South trade issue which, more often than not, is totally ignored in the sustainability debate. There is nothing wrong with trade per se, but the question is - is that trade fair? Does the local coastal communities benefit or suffer from the exchange? At Fish4Ever we regard this issue as a fundamental question. In the case of canned tuna for example, a handful of countries - made up of the US and some of the bigger EU nations – account for a massive 75% of consumption. “European fishing vessels are not just responsible for the collapse of EU fisheries, but due to bilateral agreements with many West African nations such as Mauritania, Senegal, Cape Verde, and Guinea, the fisheries in that region of the Atlantic are under threat of collapse."Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel – Sustain 2005
"Africa alone is now losing almost 1 billion US dollars a year to illegal fishing activities. Pirate fishing operations are stealing an invaluable protein source from some of the world’s poorest people while damaging the livelihoods of legitimate local fishermen"
Pirate Fish on Your Plate - Environmental Justice Foundation EJF (2007)
It is important to understand the global nature of the fishing industry. It is in the advanced nations that an increasing appetite for fish has first driven many of our own fish stocks into collapse and then driven the industry to seek new fishing grounds out on the high seas and into the coastal waters of the rest of the world. African coastal waters, for example supply Europe with 25% of it’s fish consumption. The richest fishing and feeding grounds are always located in coastal waters: WWF estimates that coastal areas are home to 90% of the world’s marine species. (WWF Oceans, Coasts & People 2008)
Source FAO State of World Fisheries 2007: fish exports from the developing world are bigger than coffee, cocoa, banana and tea altogether There are two inter-linked issues: Resource Theft and Illegal Fishing. Countries with a coastline have under international law (The UN Convention on The law of the Sea 1982) an exclusive right to the sea for up to 200 nautical miles – or around 370KM. This is known as an EEZ or Exclusive Economic Zone. In North-North negotiations, the EEZ is either kept for the fishing fleet of the country bordering the ocean or access is granted on a reciprocal basis. In North-South negotiation access is granted to the foreign fishing fleet by the developing countries in return for a fee. The issue of Resource Theft centres around whether that fee is sufficient and whether the contract allowing exploitation of the resource is fair.
Beyond that there is a sustainability question since many of the contract entered into have historically being extremely weak in terms of sustainability and there is a question of policing, since many of the developing countries do not have deep enough pockets or the right systems to enforce compliance with a contract.
In other words the door is left wide open to illegal fishing. Outside of the question of the contract itself is the question of who actually gets the benefit of the fee in the “South” country – is the fishing and coastal community benefitting or local politicians?. As part of the overall picture of benefits is the question of production; increasingly and, due to labour cost differentials, more and more production has shifted to the “South”. Again this is not necessarily a bad thing. One of the key observations of the nature of commodity production or commodity markets is that most the value congregates at the top so a cacao grower gets a minute part of the total cost of the end product. Shifting production to the South then allows for more benefit to be retained in the South through jobs and investments. In the fish business, both primary (e.g. de-gutting, filleting) and secondary (e.g. canning) processing have become globalised. Many developing nations have found this process, in fish or other products, to be a double-edged swords because to compete in a global market requires such a low cost of production that in fact there is very little net benefit transferred down the chain. This is equally the experience of trade in a North-North scenario with the difference that the legal environment for labour rights, health and hygiene conditions is better.
Source FAO State of World Fisheries 2007
The Chart includes China which is a huge producer of aquaculture and fish processor but, is China still “the South?”
So there are many, many issues around the whole question of fair or equitable trading between North and South, essentially between a producing and a consuming country. And no doubt there is a fair amount of disagreement over what constitutes fair exchange and whether trade, in and of itself, produces the impetus or stimulus to become a developed nation. One issue that is far less controversial is the question of illegal fishing - that is plainly wrongly. Illegal fishing goes hand in hand with foreign access agreements – infractions include legal boats using illegal methods, legal boats transferring their catch to boats that are not permitted to fish, legal boats declaring their catch as a “high seas” catch just outside the EEZ, foreign boats fishing in restricted areas, including marine parks or areas reserved to local fishermen as well as straightforward illegal fishing. One of the most comprehensive reports on illegal fishing was produced by MRAG for DFID, part of the UK Government and entitled “Review of Impacts of Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing on Developing Countries (2005)” it was part of a global High Seas Task Force which estimated total global catches of illegal fish at anything between $4bn to $9bn a year. Losses from the waters of Sub-Saharan Africa amount to $1bn per amount or around ¼ of Africa’s total annual fisheries exports, that’s $1bn stolen from some of the poorest countries in the world.
Source MRAG Review of Illegal Fishing and Developing Countries (2005)
We decided to superimpose this Illegal Fishing Map to the Tuna Catch Maps that are produced by the Regional Tuna Authorities. We mapped a variety of maps but will here concentrate on two maps. One from ICCAT, which is the Tuna Authority for the whole of the Atlantic and there relevant to West Africa showing catch statistics for Yellowfin Tuna. The second shows the same thing for East Africa but with respect to catches of Skipjack Tuna from the IOTC (the Tuna Authority for the Indian Ocean) and shows in light green the purse-seiner catch for skipjack tuna from 2000 to 2006. Both of these superimposed catch statistic maps show a big correlation with zones of massive illegal fishing. Note especially the waters of Somalia which has recently been much in the news for piracy but in light of this theft of Somalia’s resources where anything between 50% to 100% of the catch is illegal, pointing out the pirate seems to be very much a matter of opinion.
Source ICCAT (the tuna authority for the Atlantic) with the Purse-Seiner catch in yellow and local baitboats (pole&line) in red for Yellowfin tuna from 2000/04.
Source: IOTC (the Tuna Authority for the Indian Ocean) and shows in light green the purse-seiner catch for skipjack tuna from 2000 to 2006. It gets worse unfortunately. According to figures quoted from ICCAT “the average size of yellowfin caught ranges from 2.5 kg in Tema (Ghana) to 30 kg around the Azores, Canary Islands, and Cape Verde” and “The main spawning ground of yellowfin is the equatorial zone of the Gulf of Guinea (off the Coast of Ghana), with spawning primarily occurring from January to April. Juveniles are generally found in coastal waters off Africa”. Basically the foreign purse seine fleet is deliberately targeting skipjack with sets on FAD’s where it is known that there will be large quantities of juvenile yellowfin (and bigeye) tuna caught and killed as by-catch – even though both yellowfin and bigeye populations are seriously endangered. Illegal catches, resource theft, unsustainable methods and foreign fleets are all combined off the coasts of some of the poorest and most indebted nations in the world.
The FAO table of UK skipjack imports shows that more than 50% of UK tuna imports actually comes from Africa, so presumably so does the fish that’s packed there. We’ve re-produced the MRAG map with arrows to geographically position the three most important countries in Africa where this production is located, each of which is adjacent to these zones where massive illegal fishing takes place. Incidentally less than 2% of this catch comes from a guaranteed and exclusively pole & line fishery, the sustainable method of catching skipjack – and this is where we source our skipjack. There are other artisan pole & line fisheries elsewhere but it is hard to separate this “good” catch from the “bad” catch without defined controls and traceability systems.
Source: Globefish March 2008, the FAO Market Reports Website
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