Saving Seafood

Taiwan Seeks to Improve Conditions in Fishing Fleet

October 4th, 2016 — Commercial fishing boat owners in Taiwan, one of the world’s biggest seafood exporters, face strict rules and potential fines under a new law aimed at preventing overfishing and protecting migrant crewmembers who work far at sea with little oversight.

The Distant Water Fisheries Act, which takes effect Jan. 15, 2017, comes amid growing pressure on Taiwan’s seafood industry to crack down on modern-day slavery and other abuses for the more than 20,000 migrants working on the island’s fleet of fishing vessels.

Frances Lee, a spokeswoman for Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said new requirements for the foreign fishermen will include insurance, health care, wages, working hours and human rights.

Last year the European Union gave Taiwan a “yellow card” warning for failing to control illegal fishing on its commercial vessels, which sail around the world to catch some $2 billion a year worth of exported tuna and other seafood every year. Without improvements, Taiwan’s $14 million worth of seafood exports to the EU could face sanctions.

The U.S. State Department’s 2016 Trafficking in Persons report says that while Taiwan has cracked down on forced labor and sex trafficking, fishing vessels need more attention. The report says fishermen mostly from Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam have been fraudulently recruited to work on Taiwan-flagged vessels where they can face abuses including violence, limited food supplies and withheld wages.

The issues extend well beyond Taiwan. Commercial fishing boat owners around the world, including the U.S., recruit foreign crews for the dangerous and exhausting work of hauling in the catch. The migrant fishermen are vulnerable to human trafficking and other exploitation because the work takes place so remotely, far from police or labor officials, and they can remain offshore for years as their catch is shuttled in to port.

Several nonprofit advocacy groups including Greenpeace and the International Labour Organization have repeatedly raised concerns about working conditions for foreign crew in Taiwan’s fishing fleet.

Allison Lee at the Yilan Fishermen’s Labor Union, which represents migrant workers in Taiwan, said men have been beaten, overworked and denied pay on board boats.

Read the full story at The New York Times 

Vietnamese Fishermen Sue Taiwan Steel Firm Over Fish Deaths

September 27th, 2016 — Hundreds of Vietnamese fishermen have filed claims seeking compensation from a Taiwanese steel company that acknowledged its toxic chemicals caused a massive fish kill, a local priest helping the fishermen said Tuesday.

The factory, owned by the Formosa Plastics Group, acknowledged in June that it was responsible for the pollution that killed large numbers of fish off the central Vietnamese coast in April, and pledged to pay $500 million to clean it up and compensate affected people. The pollution created the country’s worst environmental disaster, devastating the regional fishing and tourism industries, and sparked rare protests in the Communist country.

Catholic priest Dang Huu Nam, who led the group of local fishermen, said 506 petitions have been submitted to a local court in Ky Anh town in central Ha Tinh province where the massive fish kill occurred.

“Based on the fact that Formosa admitted their mistake, based on the Vietnamese laws and the losses suffered by the fishermen, they have submitted their claims and they demand that Formosa be closed and compensate their losses as well as material and health losses they may suffer in the future,” Nam said Tuesday by telephone from the courthouse.

Read the full story at The New York Times 

Indonesia’s Solution to Illegal Fishing Boats Is Just to Blow Them Up

September 21, 2016 — The South China Sea and its surrounding waters are the most hotly contested fishing grounds in the world, with China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei all laying claim to parts of the region and the delicious seafood within. But while the competing nations are engaging in dangerous standoffs and fishing the Sea to collapse, nearby, around the Natuna Islands, Indonesia has developed a policy of dealing with illegal fishing that’s having some unexpected benefits: by blowing up poachers’ boats.

And it’s working! They’ve put a dent in overfishing and rejuvenated their fisheries. Bloomberg reports that Indonesia’s policy of destroying illegal fishing vessels is giving the fishing stocks within Indonesia’s economic exclusivity zone (EEZ) the chance to rebound, according to Indonesia’s Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti. In recent years, Indonesia’s fishing haul has risen from 2.5 million tons to 6.6 million tons this year. Next year, the stock might even be sustainable, with Indonesian fishermen bringing in nearly 10 million tons of seafood.

Since the end of 2014, Indonesia has blasted 220 boats to the briny depths, making something of a show of the whole thing by dramatically blowing up the boats in public in various locations around the country.

Read the full story at VICE

Vietnam probes harmful waste dumping from Taiwanese firm

August 3, 2016 — HANOI, Vietnam ” Vietnamese police have launched an investigation into the illegal dumping of harmful waste material from a Taiwanese steel company already under fire for massive fish deaths in what officials say was the country’s worst environmental disaster.

Bui Dinh Quang, deputy police chief in Ha Tinh province where a unit of the Formosa Plastics Group is located, said a local company was the target of the investigation after police last month caught the company burying the industrial waste at a private farm.

About 390 tons of the waste was buried in two places, including on the private farm in Ha Tinh province, Quang said.

He said tests by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment confirmed the waste contained harmful levels of cyanide.

Quang said Formosa and its executives will also be investigated for signing a contract with the local company, which was not authorized to handle harmful industrial waste.

Formosa acknowledged in June that it was responsible for the pollution that killed large numbers of fish off the central Vietnamese coast, and pledged to pay $500 million to clean it up and compensate affected people.

The government in a report to the National Assembly last month said the disaster harmed the livelihoods of more than 200,000 people, including 41,000 fishermen in four central provinces.

An estimated 115 tons of fish washed ashore along more than 200 kilometers (125 miles) of Vietnam’s central coast in April, the report said. The pollution sparked rare protests across the country.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Dozens of countries just agreed to shut pirate fishermen out of their ports. Here’s why.

June 9, 2016 — Indonesia has a ruthless strategy for dealing with pirates: blow up their boats.

Over the past two years, the Indonesian Navy has seized more than 100 vessels flagged from Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines — all accused of fishing illegally in Indonesian waters. Whenever this happens, authorities detain the crew, load the empty boat with explosives, and let it burn as a warning to others:

Except it doesn’t work. Or at least it’s not nearly enough. There are always more boats, more desperate fishermen looking for work. And the oceans are vast; it’s impossible to board every last pirate ship out there. Last year, New Zealand’s navy spent two weeks chasing illegal fishing vessels at sea before running out of fuel and giving up.

Worldwide, illegal fishing vessels now catch some 26 million tons of fish a year, worth $23.5 billion, or one-fifth of the entire world’s annual wild catch. It’s one of the biggest problems in marine policy. Experts say these catches undermine fishing limits that nations put in place to prevent fish stocks from getting depleted too rapidly and collapsing. Illegal fishing also undercuts the legal fishermen trying to earn a living. And many of these ships end up killing protected species, like sharks.

Read the full story at Vox

Toxic Fish in Vietnam Idle a Local Industry and Challenge the State

June 8, 2016 — NHAN TRACH, Vietnam — Since a devastating fish kill blighted the waters along 120 miles of coastline in central Vietnam, hundreds of people are believed to have fallen ill from eating poisoned fish. Here in the fishing village of Nhan Trach, the squid that sustain the local economy have virtually disappeared. And a fishing ban has left hundreds of traps sitting unused on the beach and dozens of small fishing boats idle.

“We are so angry,” said Pham Thi Phi, 65, who operates a fishing boat in Nhan Trach with her husband and three grown sons. “If we knew who put the poison in the ocean, we would like to kill them. We really need to have an answer from the government on whether the ocean is totally clean and the fish are safe to eat.”

While the immediate cause appears to have been toxic waste from a nearby steel mill, fury over the episode has exploded into a national issue, posing the biggest challenge to the authoritarian government since a spate of anti-Chinese riots in 2014. Protesters demanding government action have marched in major cities and coastal communities over the past six weeks, escalating what had been a regional environmental dispute into a test of government accountability and transparency.

But two months after the fish started washing up on beaches here, the government has yet to announce the cause of the disaster or identify the toxin that killed marine life and poisoned coastal residents.

Read the full story at The New York Times

Vietnamese Police Break Up Protest Over Fish Deaths

June 6, 2016 — HANOI, Vietnam — Police in Vietnam’s capital have broken up a protest over what critics charge is the government’s delayed response to massive fish deaths which they believe are linked to industrial pollution.

A protester, Le Hoang, said more than 30 people marched peacefully in downtown Hanoi for about 15 minutes on Sunday before most were taken to police stations in two buses. He said they were held for several hours and then released without charge.

Thousands of dead fish began washing ashore along more than 200 kilometers (120 miles) of shoreline in four central provinces in early April. Protesters and state media speculated that a steel complex owned by a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastic Corp. may have been linked to what was an unprecedented environmental disaster for the Southeast Asian country.

The fishing and tourism industries in the provinces have been badly affected by the incident.

Hoang said the protesters held banners and placards reading “No Formosa” and “Sea dead, fish dead and people dead.” The protest Sunday was the latest in a series that are unusual under the tightly controlled Communist regime.

Read the full story at The New York Times

How China’s fishermen are fighting a covert war in the South China Sea

April 13, 2016 — TANMEN, China — In the disputed waters of the South China Sea, fishermen are the wild card.

China is using its vast fishing fleet as the advance guard to press its expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea, experts say. That is not only putting Beijing on a collision course with its Asian neighbors, but also introducing a degree of unpredictability that raises the risks of periodic crises.

In the past few weeks, tensions have flared with Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam as Chinese fishermen, often backed up by coast guard vessels, have ventured far from their homeland and close to other nations’ coasts. They are just the latest conflicts in China’s long-running battle to expand its fishing grounds and simultaneously exert its maritime dominance.

See the full story at The Washington Post

China’s Island Building Hurts Environment, U.S. Report Says

April 13, 2016 — China’s reclamation work in the South China Sea may have destroyed coral reefs, damaged fisheries in a region heavily dependent on seafood and breached international law on protecting the environment, according to a report to U.S. Congress.

“The scale and speed of China’s activities in the South China Sea, the biodiversity of the area, and the significance of the Spratly Islands to the ecology of the region make China’s actions of particular concern,” an April 12 report prepared for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said.

China reclaimed about 3,000 acres of land on seven features it occupies in the Spratly islands of the South China Sea between December 2013 and October 2015, the report said. Vietnam has reclaimed about 80 acres, Malaysia 70 acres, the Philippines 14 acres and Taiwan eight acres, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

See the full story at Bloomberg

Indonesia Sinks 23 Foreign Fishing Boats

April 5, 2016 — JAKARTA, Indonesia — Indonesian authorities on Tuesday blew up 23 foreign vessels that were captured for fishing illegally in the country’s waters.

The boats, 13 from Vietnam and 10 from Malaysia, were blown up simultaneously in seven ports from Tarakan in northern Kalimantan to Ranai on the Natuna Islands in the South China Sea.

Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti witnessed the destruction, which was coordinated by the navy, coast guard and police, via live-streamed Internet video at her office in downtown Jakarta.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at The New York Times