A sea of troubles: robbing the poor to feed the rich.

THE END OF THE LINE

HOW OVERFISHING IS CHANGING THE WORLD AND WHAT WE EAT

By Charles Clover

[pounds sterling]14.99 Ebury Press

ISBN 0-0918-9780-7

In the introduction to this remarkable book, Charles Clover asks the reader to conjure up an image of a group of hunters riding two immense all-terrain vehicles. Between these vehicles, is strung a net--measuring kilometres in width--with a huge metal roller attached to the leading bottom edge.

Moving in tandem, the two vehicles pick up speed, the rolling beam smashing and flattening obstructions, flushing creatures into the approaching filament net. Into this net is scooped everything in its way: predators such as lions and cheetahs, lumbering endangered herbivores such as rhinos and elephants, herds of impala and wildebeest, family groups of warthogs and wild dogs. Pregnant females would be swept up and carried along, with only the smallest juveniles able to wriggle through the mesh.

The effect of dragging a huge iron bar across the savannah is to break off every outcrop, up-root every tree, bush and flowering plant, stirring columns of birds into the air. Left behind is a straggling landscape resembling a harrowed field.

After travelling for a number of hours for tens of kilometres at a time, the industrial hunter-gatherers riding on the two mighty vehicles stop to examine the tangled mass of writhing or dead creatures in the net. There are no markets for about one-third of their catch because they don't taste good or are simply too small or too squashed. This pile of corpses is simply dumped on the plain to be consumed by carrion.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This surreal scenario, you might ask, could surely never happen in real life? Wrong, it could and it does. A close variant of this practice happens around the world each and every day. This highly unselective way of killing animals is known as ocean trawling.

But, as Glover reminds us, "because what fishermen do is obscured by distance and the veil of water that covers the Earth, and because fish are cold-blooded and not cuddly, most people still view what happens at sea differently to what happens on land".

OCEAN CRISIS GREATER THAN POLLUTION

Put simply, man's love of consuming fish is unsustainable--particularly in the West where a fish diet is both fashionable and seen as a more healthy alternative diet to one of meat.

Around the world there is evidence that numerous types of fish, such as northern cod, North Sea mackerel, the marbled rock cod of Antartica and, to a great extent, the west Atlantic's bluefin tuna, have been fished out--like the great whales before them--and are not recovering.

In a single human lifetime, Clover insists, we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans far greater than any yet caused by pollution.

The author compares this crisis with the destruction of mammoths, bison and whales, the rape of the rainforests and the pursuit of bushmeat.

In case we might dismiss this argument as the views of a journalist-author simply out to shock us, Clover quotes a number of academics.

First he turns to Ransom Myers who was one of the authors of a report published in the science journal Nature. Myers says: "From giant blue marlin to giant bluefin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean. There is no blue frontier left.

"Since 1950 with the onset of industralised fisheries, we have rapidly reduced the resource base to less than 10%--not just in some areas, not just for some stocks, but for entire communities of these large fish species from the tropics to the poles."

Boris Worm, of Germany's University of Kiel agrees: "The impact we have had on ecosystems has been vastly under-estimated. These are the megafauna, the big species of the sea and the species we most value. Their depletion not only threatens the future of these fish and the fishers that depend on them, it could also bring about a complete reorganisation of ocean ecosystems, with unknown global consequences."

In a conversation with Donald Manahan, professor of biological sciences at the University of Southern California, Clover recalls Manahan telling him that his lecturer warned him as a student in the 1970s that in his life-time 'all the world's fisheries will be gone. They will have collapsed or be in decline'. "I had no idea how right he was," Manahan told the author.

A GLOBAL PROBLEM

This book concurs with these views, and argues that, as a result of over fishing, we are nearing the end of the line for fish stocks and whole ecosystems in the world's oceans. And, while this is a global problem that might best be observed in those oceans close to the markets of North America, Europe and the Far East, it is a problem that looks certain to switch in emphasis from those regions to those of Africa and the other developing, and developed, nations of the south.

Clover's research took him around the world--from Japan's Tsukiji market, the largest fish market in the world, to Esbjerg the largest port on Denmark's North Sea coast--from Goat Island Marine Reserve in New Zealand to Bonavista, Newfoundland, Canada.

Along the way he also visited Senegal. The European Union (which comes out of this book very badly--its record of looking after its own fish stocks is evidence of stunningly short-sighted incompetence) had, shortly before Clover's visit, signed a new deal with several West African countries, including Senegal.

"The beneficiaries of these little-publicised agreements," Clover tells us, "are distant water trawlers from Spain, France, Italy and Greece."

Fed by one of the Atlantic's great up-wellings, the waters of West Africa are among the world's richest, with more than 1,200 species of fish. Upward ocean currents, created by the force of trade winds rushing off the desert of Mauritania and out to sea, draw nutrients to the surface from the deep. These nutrients stimulate plankton, the base of the whole marine food-chain.

But for a decade, fish scientists have warned that the fish stocks of West Africa's continental shelf are over-exploited and that some, such as grouper and sea bream, are actively facing collapse. There is nothing in place to prevent their fate resembling that of the once-innumerable northern cod off Newfoundland or the North Sea cod.

And there is little to suggest that this agreement with the EU, (conveniently negotiated just before the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development) will do anything to rectify or improve matters. Tellingly, Clover writes: "The agreement imposes no catch quotas to conserve stocks. Instead, it sets the total tonnage of vessels that may fish in Senegalese waters at any one time."

THE CATCH-ALL CLAUSE

This arrangement means that EU trawlers can catch all they want, and the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) estimates that EU vessels catch up to eight times their declared totals.

"There's no escaping the fact that the destruction of West African fish stocks has arisen mainly from demand in Europe, followed closely by Japan and Taiwan--a fact that the consumers of those countries are almost entirely unaware of," Clover tells us.

And in answering the question of why Senegal sold its rights, then worth some $67m, Clover says that Dr Ndiaga Gueye, Senegal's director of marine fisheries, simply says that for Senegal, that was a tidy sum of money--and it was sorely needed for hospitals and schools so that the next generation might learn to be something other than fishermen.

And it seems that its not just rich countries that seek out the poorer nations to make deals. Individual fishing boat skippers can, Clover points out, make an arrangement with a particular African country on the spur of the moment and negotiate their own private arrangements by fax.

Not that this type of arrangement is without its pitfalls. Clover tells us that he heard of one skipper of a Spanish-owned vessel who thought he had bought the rights to fish in Somalia's waters from one particular Somali warlord.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

However, when the vessel began fishing for tuna, the crew were horrified to see themselves being overtaken by a speedboat carrying heavily-armed British mercenaries who told the skipper of the tuna boat that it would have to pay some $200,000--or the vessel would be diverted to Mogadishu and impounded.

It says something of the profitability of tuna fishing that the money was on hand at head office and transferred very quickly. Without further ado, the mercenaries took their leave. Apparently, the skipper had originally contacted the wrong warlord for the area he was fishing in.

ALL DOOM AND GLOOM?

So is man's exploitation of the oceans all doom and gloom? Not necessarily, according to Clover. Technology can play its part--such as the transceivers that transmit a position several times a day via satellite which are required for tuna boats fishing under licence in Kenyan and Madagascan waters and can help regulate fishing activities.

And Africans can resist the pressures and blandishments of entering fishery-access agreements. Namibia was the first to crack down on EU trawlers back in 1992, followed in 2001 by Morocco throwing all foreign trawlers out of their waters altogether.

Spanish trawlers had continued to harvest huge quantities of Namibian hake long after that country's independence, but there was an acute danger of the hake stocks collapsing altogether. So the Namibians decided to get tough. They hired a helicopter and local fisheries inspectors alighted on the decks of illegal fishermen to carry out arrests.

"The Spanish were indignant," Clover says. "Gradually, the Namibians took control and used their marine resources for their own benefit. Fisheries have since become that country's main engine of economic growth."

And if consumers could be taught more informed buying habits, and exert political pressure for the conservation of fish stocks, that would make a huge difference. We need to fish less, eat less fish, know more about what we are eating, and favour the most selective and least wasteful fishing methods.

We also need to give fishermen tradable rights to fish accompanied by new responsibilities, create reserves to protect spawning and migration hotspots, make regional fishery bodies responsible for the high seas work properly, and organise a quiet democratic revolution whereby citizens gain overall control of the seas.

Clover advises that we avoid eating the 'dirty dozen'--Atlantic cod, haddock, halibut as well as bluefin tuna, caviar, European hake and sea bass, grouper, snapper, Patagonoian toothfish, orange roughy and scallops. Of the dozen fish species he singles out that we may eat with less conscience he makes particular reference to tilapia saying "this and other vegetarian fish are the one true hope of the developing world and could be everybody's future. Might as well get used to cooking them now".