International & Trade

September 19, 2012 — The wanted Sea Shepherd leader, Paul Watson, is marshalling resources for the biggest campaign yet against Japanese Antarctic whaling.

Watson said that despite being without a passport and moving in secret, he intended to lead the campaign by 120 people on four ships this summer.

"We aim to stop them completely this time," he told Fairfax. "They will be so financially in the hole that they can't climb out."

Official pressure on Watson is escalating with a second Red Notice, or international wanted persons alert, issued by Interpol at the request of Japan for alleged hooliganism, vandalism and damage.

The Japanese prosecution relates to the 2010 boarding of a whaling ship by then Sea Shepherd activist Pete Bethune.

A tip-off from inside Germany's Justice Ministry enabled Watson to evade a Japanese extradition request and skip bail July 22, he said. "They would have seized me the next morning."

He was being detained in Germany on €250,000 ($A293,000) bail following the surprise re-appearance of 10-year-old navigation charges from Costa Rica.

Since then Watson, 61, has refused to disclose his location. Asked in a telephone interview whether he was on land or at sea, he replied: "I don't have a passport, so it's pretty hard to move around."

Nevertheless, he said Sea Shepherd's funds for its ninth Antarctic campaign had been boosted by "my problems". The US Animal Planet television production firm has signed on for another series of Whale Wars, and crews enlisted to go south.

 

Read the full story at the Sydney Morning Herald

 

 

MAHACHAI, Thailand — September 20, 2012 — At an age when she should have been in a classroom, Thazin Mon discovered her knack for peeling shrimp. To help support her Burmese migrant family, the 14-year-old pulled 16-hour shifts, seven days a week, for less than $3 a day. “I am uneducated, so I work. I have to work bravely,” she says.

Although she was the best peeler in the factory, speed was never enough. Mon was beaten if she slowed down, she said. And when she asked for a day off to rest hands swollen with infection, her boss kicked her and threatened rape.

Thanks to a bottomless appetite for cheap shrimp in the West, Burmese migrants such as Mon are the backbone of a Thai shrimp industry that is the world’s third largest. The United States is Thailand’s top customer, accounting for a third of the country’s annual shrimp exports.

Rights groups say that overseas demand for shrimp products in greater volume has fueled a culture of exploitation in the Thai industry. They insist the failure of foreign companies to sufficiently verify the origin of the shrimp they import allows abuses to persist.

“If you look at the cost of shrimp overseas, it’s very, very cheap, and that comes from the exploitation inherent in the shrimp industry,” says Andy Hall, an expert on migration at Mahidol University who tracks Burmese labor in the Thai seafood industry.

Brisk business with major U.S. retailers such as Wal-Mart, Costco, Sam’s Club and Red Lobster pumps more than a billion dollars in revenue each year into the Thai economy, the second largest in Southeast Asia. As Thai living standards have risen, a shortage of unskilled labor has attracted tens of thousands of Burmese migrants looking to escape the poverty and job scarcity that has gripped their homeland for decades.

Most head to Samut Sakhon province, the heart of the processing industry just south of the capital, Bangkok, where modern facilities line the highway alongside fast-food chains and car dealerships. The more prominent factories are the size of football fields, with neon signage and billboards that feature smiling children. But there’s a darker side behind the scenes, activists say.

Of an estimated 400,000 migrants at work in the province, only about 70,000 are legally registered. The rest are employed illegally in anonymous peeling sheds that supply the larger companies that must fill massive orders from abroad. At this lower end of the supply chain, according to migrant activists, crooked brokers and employers trap scores of Burmese in abusive conditions tantamount to slavery, particularly in the shrimp industry.

“The small factory owners know that most of their workers are undocumented, so they can control the workforce however they want — such as locking workers in until they finish their work,” says Sompong Sakaew, a labor activist based in Mahachai, the provincial capital. “There are also teenagers between 12 and 17 years old in the workforce.”

Read the full story at the Washington Post

 

 

September 18, 2012 — Oceana, the international advocacy group working to protect the world’s oceans, is urging the European Parliament Fisheries Committee to vote tomorrow, September 19, in favour of a strict European ban on shark finning, which would require all sharks to be landed with their fins still attached.

Although shark finning has theoretically been prohibited in the EU since 2003, loopholes in the current legislation make the ban practically impossible to enforce. The vote in Brussels is a key step towards rectifying the flawed legislation, which would then require the formal approval of the wider parliament before taking effect.

“With the largest shark fisheries in the world, the EU has an acknowledged responsibility to act as an international leader in shark conservation and management,” stated Xavier Pastor, Executive Director of Oceana Europe. “Tomorrow, Members of the European Parliament have a critical opportunity to display that leadership, by calling for a ban that actually works."

Shark finning – the practice of cutting off a shark’s fins and discarding the body at sea – is technically prohibited in EU waters and on EU vessels worldwide, but an exemption allows Member States to issue special permits for fishing vessels to remove shark fins on board. Under the current system of controls, it is extremely difficult to detect when finning has occurred, not least because shark fins and carcasses can be landed in separate ports at separate times.

Oceana strongly supports landing sharks with their fins attached because:

· It is the simplest and most effective means of guaranteeing that no finning occurs

· It facilitates the collection of critical data about shark populations (because shark species are much easier to identify when their fins are still attached)

“Because finning is a widely recognised threat to shark populations, the fins-attached approach has already been adopted by many countries, including shark-fishing nations such as the USA and Chile,” added Dr. Allison Perry, marine wildlife scientist with Oceana Europe. “Within the EU, the fins-attached policy is de facto already implemented by nearly all Member States – only Spain and Portugal continue to remove shark fins onboard vessels.”

The EU catches sharks in the Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean, and Pacific Oceans. It is the largest shark fishing entity in the world (with 17% of reported shark catches in 2009) and is the largest exporter of shark fins to the main Hong Kong and mainland China.

 

Read the full story on Fish Update

 

 

September 18, 2012 — The marine conservation organization Oceana urges the Fisheries Committee of the European Parliament (EP) on Wednesday to vote in favour of the strict prohibition of finning so that all sharks are landed with their fins attached.

While this practice has been banned in the EU countries since 2003, the gaps in the current legislation makes it virtually impossible for the measure to be enforced rigorously.

The reform of this imperfect legislation is expected to be authorized tomorrow and to be later approved by the EP.

"With the largest shark fishery in the world, the European Union (EU) has taken the responsibility of internationally leading the shark conservation and management," said Xavier Pastor, Executive Director of Oceana in Europe.

"Tomorrow, the EP members have a critical opportunity to demonstrate that leadership demanding a ban that actually works," he added.

Under finning legislation, there is an exemption that allows Member States to issue special permits for vessels to cut the fins on board.

Oceana points out that with the current control system, it is very difficult to detect if the fishermen performed shark finning, especially because the fins and the trunks can be landed at various ports and at different times.

 

Read the full story here

 

 

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — September 14, 2012 — Antarctica’s Ross Sea is often described as the most isolated and pristine ocean on Earth, a place where seals and penguins still rule the waves and humans are about as far away as they could be. But even there it has proven difficult, and maybe impossible, for nations to agree on how strongly to protect the environment.

The United States and New Zealand have spent two years trying to agree on an Alaska-sized marine sanctuary where fishing would be banned and scientists could study climate change. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton took a strong interest in the outcome, regularly prodding diplomats, and New Zealand recently sent a delegation to Washington to reach a tentative deal.

That compromise, over a region that accounts for less than 2 percent of New Zealand’s fishing industry, flopped this month when senior New Zealand politicians rejected it behind closed doors.

The U.S. and New Zealand have now sent competing plans to the 25 countries that meet annually each October to decide the fate of Antarctica’s waters. Their inability to agree greatly increases the chances that nothing will get done.

Evan Bloom, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Ocean and Polar Affairs, said the U.S. put a great deal of effort into its reserve proposal because it believes the Ross Sea is the best place on Earth for scientists to carry out studies away from the influence of mankind.

‘‘If you can’t do it in Antarctica, where can you do it?’’ said Bloom.

Both countries advocated for marine sanctuaries. The differences between the two plans seem small on a map, but they center on the areas of the sea where marine life is most abundant.

The U.S. does not have fishing interests in the Ross Sea, though fish caught there often end up in high-end American restaurants, marketed as Chilean sea bass.

The species is actually an ugly creature called the Antarctic toothfish. Fishermen from New Zealand, South Korea, Russia and other nations have been catching them in the Ross Sea since the 1990s. They use lines that can stretch more than a mile to catch about 100,000 of them a year.

The U.S. aimed to reach an agreement with a nation that fishes the Ross Sea in hopes it would lead to a broader deal to protect marine habitats there.

New Zealand wanted to minimize disruption to its fisheries, but also wanted to burnish its conservation credentials. The country not only prides itself as an environmental leader, but it also makes money by marketing its clean, green image to trading partners and tourists. And it has criticized other nations’ environmental records at sea, particularly nations that allow whaling.

Clinton urged diplomats to craft a deal. When she visited the Cook Islands last month, she described the Ross Sea as ‘‘one of the last great marine wilderness areas on the planet’’ and said the U.S. was working with other countries, ‘‘in particular New Zealand,’’ to establish protected areas. Murray McCully, New Zealand’s foreign affairs minister, echoed her comments.

Late last month, senior New Zealand diplomat Gerard van Bohemen led a team to Washington that spent four days grinding out the details of a compromise. After he brought the proposal back to New Zealand’s ruling National Party, its senior Cabinet of lawmakers met in a closed session and rejected it.

Exactly why, they’re not saying. Van Bohemen and Cabinet minister Steven Joyce declined to give interviews.

McCully also declined to discuss what happened, although he said in an email that New Zealand will keep working closely with the Americans.

 

Read the full story by the Associated Press in the Boston Globe

 

 

September 13, 2012 — Next week, the Fisheries Committee of European Parliament will vote to put in place a complete shark finning ban – a measure that the industry claims will cost them € 9.4 million.

According to an analysis by Oceana, Spanish and Portuguese surface longliners that are authorised to remove shark fins onboard vessels received more than €117,000,000 in EU subsidies from 1994 to 2007. The annual costs estimated by the sector represent, at most, 8% of this value. Of the subsidised vessels, 35 received more than €1,000,000 from the EU, while the sector estimates that the fins-attached policy would cost roughly €22,000 per vessel annually.

“European tax payers have invested a huge sum of money in these fishing vessels. They paid to help build them, modernise them, and support them while they headed off in search of new fishing grounds for sharks,” stated Xavier Pastor, executive director of Oceana Europe. “Now, Europe is asking these vessels to commit to sustainable fishing practices for the sake of both the sharks and the future of the fishing sector.”

 

Read the full story here

September 13, 2012 — A LEADING conservation organisation has released figures that suggest that the costs of EU’s possible decision to ban shark-finning are negligible compared to the amount the boats involved in the practice have been subsidised over the years.

The report, issued by Oceana, precedes next week’s vote by the Fisheries Committee of European Parliament over whether to put in place a complete shark-finning ban – a measure that the industry claims will cost them €9.4 million.

Yet, according to Oceana, Spanish and Portuguese surface longliners that are authorised to remove shark fins onboard vessels received more than €117,000,000 in EU subsidies from 1994 to 2007. The annual costs estimated by the sector represent, at most, 8% of this value. Of the subsidised vessels, 35 received more than €1,000,000 from the EU, while the sector estimates that the fins-attached policy would cost roughly €22,000 per vessel annually.

“European tax payers have invested a huge sum of money in these fishing vessels. They paid to help build them, modernise them, and support them while they headed off in search of new fishing grounds for sharks,” stated Xavier Pastor, executive Director of Oceana Europe. “Now, Europe is asking these vessels to commit to sustainable fishing practices for the sake of both the sharks and the future of the fishing sector.”

Next week’s vote on the proposed amendment to the European ban on shark finning (EC 1185/2003) is critical for improving shark fisheries management worldwide. The EU catches sharks in the Atlantic, Indian, Mediterranean, and Pacific Oceans, ranks second in the world for shark catches globally, and plays a major role in international policy related to sharks.

 

Read the full story on Fish News EU 

 

 

September 12, 2012 — The European Parliament has voted for a range of sanctions against Iceland and the Faroe Islands over the long-running mackerel dispute.

The island nations have been criticised for declaring huge catches of the valuable fish in recent years, leading to fears for its sustainability.

The measures include banning the import of mackerel and other fish from both countries.

Mackerel is the Scottish fishing industry's most lucrative fishery.

Landings of the fish were worth £164m in 2011 – about a third of the Scottish total.

In 2010 both Iceland and the Faroes announced large increases in quotas.

 

Read the full story at the BBC.

 

 

SEOUL, South Korea — September, 12, 2012 — North Korean fishing boats crossed the Koreas’ tense western sea boundary and retreated soon after being warned Wednesday in the second such violation this year, South Korea said. No fighting erupted though the border is one the North has long refused to recognize.

A North Korean government boat briefly crossed the boundary while trying to guide the seven fishing boats back to North Korean-controlled waters, a South Korean Defense Ministry official said on condition of anonymity, citing office rules.

Later Wednesday, seven North Korean boats again violated the boundary, but they all sailed back after a warning was broadcast, the official said. It wasn’t clear whether they were the same seven boats that earlier crossed.

Seoul says North Korean fishing boats last crossed in April. The disputed sea boundary is not clearly marked, and incursions by North Korean military and fishing boats are not unusual. Violence often erupts in the seafood-rich waters, and three naval clashes since 1999 have taken a few dozen lives.

 

Read the full story from the AP at the Boston Globe.

 

 

September 10, 2012 — The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has tightened international trade regulations for porbeagle shark (Lamna nasus) and scalloped hammerhead shark (Sphyrna lewini).

The restrictions, requested for porbeagle shark by several European Union member states and for scalloped hammerheads by Costa Rica, go into effect on 25 September, 90 days after the initial request date.

According to a letter to constituents written by Angela Somma, chief of the endangered species division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, both species are now listed in Appendix III. This gives the species a special protection among CITES membership countries, or parties, that control and monitor the international trade of that species. Any CITES party may add a native species under domestic law to Appendix III unilaterally.

Under the new shark trade restrictions, porbeagle shark and scalloped hammerhead shark must have a CITES certificate of origin issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for any shipments entering or leaving the United States. Shipments must be declared and receive clearance prior to release by U.S. Customs and Border Protection upon import or prior to export.

Hammerhead sharks, in particular, are highly sought after as the main ingredient in shark fin soup, a dish with cultural significance in Asia but one that is attracting intense scrutiny from environmental organizations. The dish is known to command extravagantly high prices, as much as USD 100 per bowl. Traditionally served at important ceremonies like weddings, it has become a symbol of status, health and prosperity that is increasingly common at high-profile business events.

Pressure from environmental groups and celebrities has altered both government and shark-sourcing policies for businesses around the world.

Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Singapore supermarket chain Cold Storage and Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd. (parent company of The Peninsula Hotels) have all stopped selling or serving shark fin soup, as have cargo carriers and passenger airlines.

According to a Chinese state media report earlier this summer, China was considering a temporary ban on shark fin soup at official banquets. At the recently concluded Seafood Summit, hosted by SeaWeb in Hong Kong, former National Basketball Association star Yao Ming, who played for the Houston Rockets, was recently named a Seafood Champion for his work in raising awareness about finning throughout China.

Finning is an illegal but reportedly common practice in which shark fins are lopped off the animals at sea while the rest of the body — about 95 percent of its total weight — is tossed overboard. Some groups estimate that 73 million of the fish, known as an apex predator for its crucial role in the ocean ecosystem, are rendered helpless and left to die.

 

Read the full story on Seafood Source