11 April 2006 - International
— We're on the tail of a huge cargo ship full
of stolen fish heading to the Spanish port of
Las Palmas. The fish, taken from the waters of
one of Africa's poorest countries - Guinea Conakry
- is bound for the plates of European consumers.
Ships supporting pirate fishing should not be
allowed entry to European ports. So Spain, are
you going to let this happen?
Working with the Environmental Justice Foundation,
we have been patrolling and documenting the activities
of fishing boats in the waters surrounding Guinea
Conakry. What we've found is certainly confusing,
and that's just the way the pirates want it to
be.
"In the past few weeks
we have begun to unravel the web of deceit around
pirate fishing," said campaigner Sarah Duthie,
from on board the Esperanza. "The way the
legal and illegal ships work together is designed
to deceive, but in the end it is a simple case
of stealing food from others."
We found the Binar 4 being loaded
with fish boxes from two Chinese fishing vessels
- Lian Run 24 and Lian Run 27. Two more, the Lian
Run 28 and Lian Run 29 were standing by, waiting
to unload their catch.
All four trawlers have been fishing in Guinea
- so transferring their catch (transshipping)
in international waters is illegal. The only place
wheretransshipping of Guinean-caught fish is legal
is in the port of Conakry. Allfour of these Lian
Run boats are licensed to fish in the waters of
Guinea andwe've documented three of the four doing
just that.
The appearance of our helicopter
provoked a dramatic reaction - it was like a cat
amongst pigeons. The crews dashed around the decks
closing hatches, disengaging the crane hook about
to transfer a load of fish awaiting transfer,
and releasing the lines securing the ships to
one another. With in half an hour, Binar 4 was
heading north, while the trawlers headed back
into Guinean waters.
Talk about acting suspiciously!
This isn't an isolated case
- during the Esperanza's patrol off the coast
of West Africa, we documented 104 foreign flagged
vessels, from Korea, China, Italy, Liberia and
Belize. We gathered evidence suggesting that around
50 percent of the ships were involved in, or least
linked to illegal fishing activities. This includes
fishing without a license, operating with no name
or hiding their identity, trawling inside the
12-mile zone restricted to local fishermen, or
transshipping anywhere other than the Guinean
capital Conakry.
We made radio contact as the
Binar 4 steamed north. They told us they were
heading to Las Palmas and had been in international
waters to tranship because they were "worried
about the army in Guinea Conakry". They had
10,000 boxes of fish on board - and weren't full!
Apparently their dramatic departure was due to
having "just got a call from Las Palmas"
saying that that they needed to go there... What
a coincidence!
