Читать книгу Captain Paul Watson Interview - Paul Watson, Michele Sciurba - Страница 23

When ships arrive at a port in Spain, Italy, or Germany they could be asked: where did you catch your fish and how did you catch them? How is your fishing organized? It is all a matter of political will. Governments could sanction illegal fishing if they wanted to. Instead, they are more concerned about having a well-functioning fishing industry.

Look at the Netherlands. It’s supposed to be a progressive country but Dutch ships currently operate the largest super trawlers off the coast of Ireland or off the coast of Africa. And these giant Dutch super trawlers are subsidized by the government.

What kind of damage do these super trawlers do and can the ocean floors recover from the damage they cause?

Well, given sufficient time any natural system can recover, if we allow it to. Ships outfitted with super trawling nets can cost between 100 and 200 million dollars and companies are eager to recoup their investments. Super trawler nets can pull in enough fish in one haul to fill three busses. The drag trawlers, which scrape the bottom of the ocean floor clean, deprive fish of the structures they need to reproduce. It’s like turning a forest into a desert. That’s what we’re doing at the bottom of the ocean, converting it into a desert that can’t sustain life. It’s incredibly greedy. It’s all investment for short-term gain. The companies operating these vessels don’t really care if the fisheries survive, because they’ll take their profits and move on to other things. It’s an economics of extinction. Scarcity translates into more demand which translates into greater profits. So, the scarcer the fish, the more money the industry makes. Mitsubishi has bluefin tuna in Japanese warehouses right now that could supply the market for the next 10, maybe 15 years. That’s how much supply they have. So, they could stop fishing right now and still supply that market. The problem for them is, if the fish recover in the wild, the value of the commodity stored in their warehouses declines, and prices go down. Whereas if the supply goes to zero, which is the case if bluefin tuna were to become extinct, they’re sitting on a priceless commodity. They can ask any price they want for it.

Oh my God.

After that, they don’t care. They just reinvest the profits into computers or jet planes or weapons, or whatever. They don’t suffer as a corporation, but those who really suffer are the communities in Sierra Leone, Senegal or India. Starting about 30 years ago, the Norwegians moved into Indian waters, and over the past 30 years have probably put about a million fishing families out of work, taking away their livelihoods. Nobody talks about that.

People always talk about all the jobs created by the fishing industry but not about the livelihoods which have been taken away by those industries. If you compare the numbers, the livelihoods lost is much greater than the number of jobs created. There is a big gap between the two.

Hasn’t traditional fishing now become one of the most dangerous professions? A traditional fishing canoe that goes out to sea is simply not equipped to compete with these much larger ships for the fish. And the canoes have to go out on rough seas because the areas where they used to catch fish is overfished due to industrialized fishing.

I’ve seen this first-hand going back as far as 1969. I served on a Norwegian bulk carrier crossing the Indian ocean and we were going probably 10 miles south of Sri Lanka, when all of a sudden, all these lights from the lanterns of a swarm of canoes started popping up in front of us. They were 10 or 20 miles off the coast of the island. The canoes were trying to signal to our ship that they were in our path and to stay where we were. But we were a 30,000-ton ship and the response of the captain was “Run them over. They can get out of our way.” And we probably did. We couldn’t tell. The ship was not going to divert course just because of a few canoes. Just recently we did an interview with some fishermen in Sierra Leone who recounted being run over by a ship and having to be rescued by another canoe. They told us local fishermen die all the time from being run over by big ships, especially the big super trawlers which view them as competition. It’s a very violent world out there.