Abstract
This book documents the unethical and illegal activities that take place in maritime industries, with a focus on the commercial fishing sector. The book is notable for both the clarity with which it lays out the factors that have led to widespread ‘theft, slavery and violence at sea’ and the evident empathy and understanding the authors demonstrate for both victims and those who, sometimes though circumstances beyond their control, became perpetrators of maritime crimes.
The book is divided into two parts, with the first seven chapters providing an overview of the fishing industry, the risks of working in it, the laws that govern it, and how these laws are being violated. There is much here that fishery scientists and managers will be familiar with but the context will be useful to those less familiar with fisheries. The second part, also in seven chapters, focuses on the plight of the fishers who work in this poorly regulated industry. This perspective is much newer to most fishery sector analysts, and you won’t find it in any standard fisheries textbook: the abuse of the fisheries labour force, both at the hands of unscrupulous commercial interests and abusive or negligent states, and the links between fisheries and crimes that include people-smuggling, drug-running, and piracy.
An introductory account of the evolution of commercial fishing and the problem of overfishing highlights the globalized nature of the fishery sector, the long history of fishery-associated migratory labour, and the historical and contemporary importance of small-scale fisheries to coastal areas. Its reliance on some heavily contested studies on the state of global fisheries may annoy some fisheries scientists but this detail should not detract from the overall message: poorly governed fisheries have terrible human costs, as well as environmental ones.
A nalysis of the risks of working at sea reveals the still-high accident and fatality rates in modern fisheries and makes a clear case that these risks are exacerbated by the economic pressures of working in a globalized, competitive industry. The mix of compiled secondary data with first-hand testimonies is effective at conveying a world of work where risks and discomforts persist at levels that most professions would consider unacceptable.
Chapter 4 outlines the historical evolution of nation states’ rights to fish, while Chapter 5 opens with a succinct and powerful statement on the injustices of allocation of fishing rights in the post-United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) world, and continues with a vivid and detailed description of material living conditions in Philippine fishing villages. Nelson Turgo’s writing captures the multiple sources of insecurity in coastal livelihoods and explains their root causes. It is powerful testimony and a reminder of the moral necessity to ‘bear witness’ to injustice, as a first step to combating it.
IUU (Illegal, Unregulated or Unreported) fishing is the only area of criminality in fisheries that has attracted the attention of fishery management agencies, perhaps because it has consequences that are directly related to the state of the fish stocks, rather than just for the people working in fisheries. The authors identify IUU fishing as the main reason why developing nations have been unable to profit from and sustain the value of their fish stocks: ‘the scourge of illegal fishing by richer nations’ (p. 82). Also exposed is the scam of flags of convenience, with ownership of such vessels traced mainly to Europe and Taiwan. Half the known European owners of such vessels are from Spain. Among accounts of the callous brutality found on fishing vessels engaged in IUU fishing, it is revealed that owners and skippers, when such vessels are intercepted and arrested, will abandon the vessels and crew, leaving their impoverished and often un-paid crews to their fate, while they ‘vanish untraceably, hidden behind corporate veils’ (p. 79). There are tales, too, of epic quests to pursue justice, such as the pursuit, for 3,900 nautical miles over eight weeks, of the Uruguayan registered Viarsa 1, by an Australian fisheries patrol boat.
The battle of wits between regulators and regulated is further outlined in Chapter 7, on fish laundering, with accounts of parallel book-keeping in the form of false fishing logs and rendezvous on the high seas to blend legal and illegal fish in ‘motherships’. The processing and re-processing of fish through China provides a preferred route for much of the world’s illegal fish, where the enormous volumes of legally traded fish provide a means to hide any amount of those illegally caught. Attempts to track down those who profit from all this criminality often lead only to ‘brass-plate companies in Honduras and Panama’. Monitoring systems in Ports have improved but transhipment at sea remains a key weakness in seafood traceability systems. Necessary for logistical reasons in distant water fleets, at-sea transhipment and processing provides the opportunity to blend legal and illegal fish and make it impossible to find out where – and by which vessel – the fish were caught.
Having laid out the state of fisheries and the weaknesses and criminalities in them, the second part of the book focus in on how fishers – and crew members in particular – are affected by all this. A review of arrests of fishermen, for fishing illegally, often in foreign waters, highlights that fishers are often pawns in geopolitical games played over claims to ocean territory: a nation may encourage or even subsidise fishing in disputed waters to establish historical rights of access (p. 118). The claimant nation may, in turn, arrest them to demonstrate the strength of their claim to sovereignty.
For those who want to know more about slavery at sea than can be gleaned from recent press reports, Chapters 9 and 10 are essential reading. They describe how the crew are trapped into exploitative labour contracts, or, in extreme cases, trafficked into slave labour. In the competitive and lucrative industrial fishing industry, which requires substantive inputs of fuel and technology, the only place where significant cost savings can be made are in labour, and so fishing vessels are dangerously undermanned – or manned by cheap or coerced labour.
The truly horrifying catalogue of abuses – listed alphabetically – to which crew are subjected, are documented in Chapter 10. Many are migrants who have been lured into fishing from poor, inland rural areas, with the promise of being able to make money to support families, purchase land, or start a family. Staggeringly, of the crews who had been rescued from boats on which they had been held as slaves, over half had witnessed the murder of a fellow crew member. This is the book you should go back to when the newspapers and TV have moved on to the next story. These abuses have been going on for decades and won’t stop without continued vigilance, backed by concerted action.
Chapter 11 gathers the stories and testimonies of those who have ‘escaped from hell’. It is clear that escape from immediate risk is often not the end of their plight. Some crews escape through mutiny or even murder of their oppressors. Or they simply find themselves free but stranded in a foreign land, with no papers, unable to afford the passage home. The case is made for a system of support, from legal representation to medical care, for those who have suffered physical abuse and deprivation. There is no mention of psychological support though surely many of those who escape will need it.
Chapter 12 turns the lens on how fishing vessels and their crews can find themselves, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in the international trade in illicit drugs. Poverty and resource degradation are identified as important contributory causes. Fishing, landing fish at small, un-policed ports, and at-sea-processing provide excellent camouflage for making unusual voyages at night, and opportunities for trans-shipment between smaller and larger vessels to evade law enforcement activities. Examples include the trade in methamphetamines between south-east Asia and southern Africa in exchange for abalone, and the 8,000-mile voyages of the tuna boats from Moss Landing, just south of San Francisco, to Colombia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the boats returning packed with cocaine. The chapter on drugs is vividly written and conveys the scale and ingenuity of drug runners and those that seek to stop them.
Fishers are both victims of and sometimes-coerced participants in acts of piracy. They are also involved in the much more common crime of robbery in port or while at anchorage. Chapter 13 provides a brief but nuanced history of how civil war and unregulated fishing and dumping of toxic chemicals at sea by EU and other international vessels gave rise to Somali piracy. Archival research on reported acts of piracy and robbery affecting fishing vessels is synthesized. The data relate to larger, mechanized vessels, while we know that theft of fishing gear and outboard engines can also affect small-scale fishing fleets, and probably involves a far larger number of incidents than are documented here.
The book points to widespread evidence of criminality embedded in various functions of the industry (catching, transhipment, processing, regulating and enforcement) and ends with a useful list of issues and the degree to which they are being addressed by current policy and legal initiatives (pp. 214–215). This charts a course of action that goes well beyond the current fishery management strategy of simply controlling IUU fishing and enforcing fish stock conservation measures. There are existing legal instruments, including the articles of various international conventions that already exist to protect the rights of Fishers, but they are under-utilized in the sector. This is a call to action for the various NGOs and seafood industry players currently pledging to add ethical dimensions to sustainable seafood certification, or to eradicate IUU fishing.
The authors manage to convey a righteous anger that is all the more powerful for being restrained, analytical and supported by both data and personal testimony. This is a necessary book for all who care about the sea and the lives of those who work on it.