January 2, 2020 — Unmanned aerial drones have the potential to combat illegal fishing, but are so far rarely used to do so.
From small, commercially-available quadcopters to large fixed-wing drones controlled by artificial intelligence, drones have the capacity to extend the eyes of fisheries enforcement officials farther into the open ocean.
December 26, 2019 — Carlos Rafael’s remaining fleet of as many as 35 groundfish vessels and skiffs in the US port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, may not be under Blue Harvest Fisheries’ Christmas tree after all.
Richard and Raymond Canastra, the founders and owners of the Buyers and Sellers Exchange (BASE), a nearly 26-year-old seafood auction house, also in New Bedford, informed the members of New England fishing sector 7 on Friday that they are taking advantage of the group’s right of first refusal (ROFR) rules to seek acquisition of the vessels and their related permits, Undercurrent News has learned from its sources.
Additionally, the Canastras have filed another challenge to Rafaels’ earlier sale of six scallop boats and their related permits to Quinn Fisheries, a longtime New Bedford-based scalloping company, this time in federal court.
Undercurrent reported late last month how documents showed Blue Harvest, a US scallop and groundfish supplier backed by New York City-based private equity Bregal Partners, had signed a purchase agreement to buy the Rafael fleet and all of their associated permits for nearly $25 million. The deal includes millions of pounds of quota for at least eight types of fish in the northeast multispecies fishery, including cod, haddock, American plaice, witch flounder, yellowtail flounder, redfish, white hake and pollock.
December 20, 2019 — Two members of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee are seeking the U.S. International Trade Commission to review the economic impact illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing has on American fishermen.
U.S. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Massachusetts), the committee’s chairman, and U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon), who chairs the Ways and Means trade subcommittee, wrote to USITC Chairman David Johanson on Thursday, 19 December, to request the study. The lawmakers are seeking to understand the true impact of IUU fishing, including its impact on production and pricing.
December 17, 2019 — Greenpeace USA, AFL-CIO, Human Rights Watch, Environmental Justice Foundation, Whole Foods Market, and 19 other groups have sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor requesting the organization end its practice of only considering a country’s territorial waters when creating its List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.
The letter, sent to Marcia Eugenio – the director of the Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking for the Bureau of International Affairs with the Department of Labor – comes in the wake of a damning report by Greenpeace identifying forced labor issues in Southeast Asia. The new report includes accusations of forced labor against 13 distant-water fishing vessels registered in China, Taiwan, Vanuatu, and Fiji.
December 17, 2019 — The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which funds the U.S. military for the 2020 fiscal year, includes provisions to combat illicit fishing and increase transparency in the seafood industry.
The bill’s fate had been in jeopardy because of questions over whether it would curtail President Donald Trump’s authority to spend defense money on the proposed border wall. Congressional negotiators kicked those negotiations down the road, and on Wednesday, 11 December, the House overwhelmingly passed the bill; bipartisan approval is expected to push it through the Senate, too.
December 16, 2019 — Despite an agreement on a resolution addressing climate change’s impact on the fisheries it regulates, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) failed to tackle several key issues at its annual meeting, which took place in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, last week.
In its most notable move during the meeting, the commission adopted a climate change resolution introduced by the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries (FFA) that acknowledges the need to address the impact of climate change on fisheries. The resolution requires the commission to consider climate change when developing conservation and management measures, and to support more science on the impact to fisheries.
December 11, 2019 — Slavery continues to plague the fishing sector in Southeast Asia, according to a new report from Greenpeace Southeast Asia.
Relying on interviews, documents, and other information, the report painted a picture of Indonesian, Filipino, and other Southeast Asian migrant fishermen working aboard distant-water vessels owned by foreign countries and suffering from mistreatment, human rights abuses, and forced labor.
December 10, 2019 — A NOAA official has charged that if federal officials were not watching when Carlos Rafael offloaded fish at the Whaling City Display Auction, the catch simply “disappeared.”
“If there was no observer on the boat, no dockside monitor, no state environmental police, no NOAA law enforcement officer, the fish would just simply disappear,” NOAA Special Agent Troy Audyatis said, “Thousands upon thousands of fish would simply disappear.”
Audyatis made the charge at a Dec. 3 meeting of the New England Fisheries Management Council while making the presentation “Catching the Codfather,” and said the New Bedford display auction was the location where Rafael offloaded much of the thousands of pounds of fish that were either under or misreported.
“Any given day fish would just disappear. There’s fish that he sold [that] he didn’t report having available for sale to NOAA and he didn’t buy from a third party, but yet he sold thousands of pounds of fish that day,” Audyatis said.
If fishing boat owners don’t report their catch to NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), there is no way for the federal government to know how much of a given species is in the ocean. Federal regulations designed to save fish stocks are dependent on knowing how much of a species is present.
December 5, 2019 — Mexico is infamous for its brutal drug cartels, which have terrorized not only the country but other large parts of Latin America. But there is one criminal organization that gets little press and that governments have yet to confront: the Cartel of the Sea. Inaction to confront this threat is having a huge economic and environmental impact in Mexico, with broader consequences for the planet.
This cartel’s business is not marijuana, cocaine or meth. It traffics in something that can be even more lucrative: the totoaba, an endangered fish. The cartel extracts the totoaba’s swim bladder, dries it and sends it to China. This is not only affecting the protected totoaba species but is also accelerating the extinction of the vaquita marina, a rare porpoise.
Many people in China believe that the buche — as the totoaba bladder is popularly known in Mexico — has aphrodisiac and medicinal properties, but there’s no scientific evidence to back this. It is also a status symbol: Serving buche soup is a sign of wealth, because one kilogram can cost more than a kilogram of cocaine — it can go for $100,000 in some Chinese cities and in New York’s Chinatown, according to investigative reports published by the nongovernmental organization Earth League International. It also communicates power, because the product comes from illegal fishing and one must have some influence to acquire it.
The Cartel of the Sea operations are based in northwestern Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez, a beautiful body of water that French explorer Jacques Cousteau once called the “world’s aquarium.”
December 5, 2019 — Few buyers of seafood from Thailand are building the cost of social and environmental compliance into the prices they’re paying, undermining efforts to keep slavery and other labor abuse issues out of the supply chain, according to a new report from Praxis Labs, funded by the non-governmental organizations Humanity United and the Freedom Fund.
The report, “Tracking Progress: Assessing Business Responses to Forced Labour and Human Trafficking in the Thai Seafood Industry,” investigated how industry responded to the exposure of labor and human rights abuses in the Thai seafood sector, which were exposed in the past five years by The Associated Press and The Guardian.