Читать книгу Captain Paul Watson Interview - Paul Watson, Michele Sciurba - Страница 21

Sea Shepherd is working with small countries like Gabon, São Tomé and Príncipe or Cape Verde. Over the past decades, Japan tried to buy the fishing rights from those countries. How do you support small countries against the overreach of larger ones?

The agencies that we deal with in these countries are trying to do something to affect positive change, but when you’re working with one agency, say the Ministry of the Environment or the Ministry of Fisheries, their goals may be at odds with the Ministry of Finance. So, when you work with one agency, your work is often being opposed by a different agency. That’s a problem when working with governments. For instance, in Peru, we’re invited in, we get to work and then suddenly, another agency decides, there are problems we better address first. In Africa, it’s the same thing. In Sierra Leone we’re getting great cooperation from the ministries we’re working with, but at the same time they’re trying to build a fish rendering plant for Japan that is handled by a different agency.

It is very, very frustrating, but it’s just something that we must live with. But we’ve successfully been able to intervene, and in the last month alone we arrested six trawlers in the waters of Sierra Leone and almost 70 trawlers in Africa over the last couple of years. So, we’re being effective. Right now, we’re working with Peru to address the presence of the Chinese fleet in the Pacific. In Mexico, the government is under a lot of pressure from the fishing communities. And there one agency gets upset with us while another agency says we’re doing a good job. It gets confusing. It’s always a problem, but we do what we can, and I think that we’ve become quite effective. We have got dozens of partnerships, but we measure the success in terms of interventions. That’s the only benchmark we can really measure.

Wildlife Rescue, Sea Shepherd Crew freeing shark caught in net.