Violence Intensifies At Sea As The Last Buffalo Hunt Continues

[hatrack]

A skinny 27-year-old Angolan fisherman, Rodriguez orders his five gristly crewmen to battle stations. He places baseball-size rocks around the greasy deck - crude artillery should the marauders draw close.

This is an act of desperation. Because in the increasingly violent struggle over the planet's last wild fish stocks - a sprawling, global food war replete with rammed boats, frenzied nighttime chases and nameless bodies washing up on desolate beaches - the outcome is all but settled.

EDIT

"For more than 50 years, the motorized fishing fleets of the industrial world have scoured the wide seas, hauling up a seemingly endless bounty of seafood. But as global fish populations shrivel - and especially since the richest nations have sealed off their coastlines inside 200-mile "exclusive economic zones" - the crews of thousands of steel-hulled trawlers from the developed world have taken to raiding or buying their way into the waters of the poor. The result: a showdown over scarce protein in which some 20 million ragged traditional fishermen such as Rodriguez are the inevitable losers. "We are witnessing the last buffalo hunt at sea," says Reg Watson, a researcher at the University of British Columbia who has helped document steep declines in the world's key seafood stocks since the 1960s. "Our southern oceans are becoming the new Wild West."


EDIT

He isn't joking. The fishing violence churning Angolan waters - like that in other pirate-infested fishing grounds in Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania - is nothing short of an undeclared guerrilla war. Occasionally the nautical skirmishes resemble B-grade Hollywood action flicks. Police hurl grappling hooks onto poaching vessels. Fistfights erupt on decks. And captured skippers hide their passports down their underwear.

Last year, one of Martins' ill-equipped fish posses angrily fired some 300 rounds of ammunition at a pirate trawler that wouldn't obey orders to stop. The barrage shattered the steel boat's windows and running lights, and snapped off the radar and radio antennas, Martins recalls. Still, the sortie failed: The poacher escaped to the open sea. Other missions have ended worse.

Illegal trawlers - lately Chinese, but also Koreans, Spaniards, Namibians, Russians and others - have rammed and sunk attacking Angolan inflatable boats, Ministry of Fisheries and Environment officials say. Other pirates have hurled buckets of boiling water on Angolan boarding parties. In one case, a foreign ship ran down and killed an irate Angolan fisherman who was trying to block its way with his rickety skiff. And at least two Angolan inspectors have vanished mysteriously while on observer duty aboard large industrial trawlers - suicides, assert the foreign skippers; pushed overboard, the fisheries police insist."

EDIT

Long, fascinating article.

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/world/9481126.htm

[salinen]

1. When you pay $29.95

for that swordfish dinner, it means one fish could be worth 1000's. As these fish numbers dwindle, their value will increase.

[whistle]

2. So Jules Verne who wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ....

...was a bit short sighted when he had Captain Nemo claim that the world's oceans would be an inexhaustible supply of food for humans in the future. Tens of thousands of off-source oil drilling rigs polluting the seas, hundreds of thousands of ships adding noise pollution and posing dangers to countless species of fish, the use of industrial fishing methods disrupting the balance of entire ocean ecosystems and estuaries and countless other greed motivated means of exploiting the worlds oceans for profit have taken their toll.

[phantom power]

3. He probably never imagined a world with 6.5 billion people

And he might have assumed that the entire volume of the oceans was equally inhabited with fish.