Stop this rape of the world’s oceans
The shorn-off heads are in the sink, eyes round and bright. Fresh mackerel, caught an hour before off the rocks on the Seven Heads, fresher than any one sees on a fishmonger’s slab. God bless the harvest of the sea! Yet I’m saddened to see these lovely creatures, so streamlined and perfect, supple and strong, lying there dead on the platter. I always feel this regret; still, my son and his friends, who caught them on a single silver spinner, tell me that when they’d caught enough to feed the various households, they began to throw those they hooked back, alive and squirming, into the sea.
My conscience is easier as I applaud their efforts. They have learned this respect; they know the planet is finite; they know the bounty must be sustained. They count what they take, and take only enough. But even enough may soon be too much.
The mackerel are masters of their element, each an exact copy, larger or smaller, of the next, replicated in infinite number, in myriad, in legion; and yet, for all their millions, can they any longer sustain their vast tribes and deliver us their annual summer bounty? Each fish spawns thousands but, yearly, fewer survive to spawn themselves.
While I worry about taking six fish, super-trawlers vacuum up entire populations. The largest in the world, the Irish registered Atlantic Dawn, takes 400 tons a day. It is licensed to fish three months a year in our waters, the rest of the year elsewhere. On its website, mackerel heads the list of species caught. If the average mackerel weighs half a pound, the Atlantic Dawn, alone, can vacuum 1.8 million mackerel from the ocean every day, seven days a week, and can accommodate 7,000 tons, over 31m fish, before landing.
How can the wealth of the ocean survive? Already, it is everywhere depleted. It is not just too many boats chasing too few fish but that, fed by subsidies, technology has outpaced the capacity of the fish to reproduce and grow.
There are 20 or more such super-trawlers fishing off the Mauritanian and Senegalese coasts. Most are European. God help the African fishermen and their families. Happily, the new Mauritanian regime is introducing controls.
Industrial-scale vessels represent only 1% of world’s fishing fleet, employ only 2% of the world’s fishermen but take 50% of the fish catch.
Furthermore, they use the most destructive and unsustainable fishing methods: purse seines and trawl nets.
The Atlantic Dawn’s purse seines measure 3,600 feet in circumference and 550 feet in depth, large enough to twice engulf (by 11ft) Ireland’s tallest building, Cork’s County Hall. The trawl nets are 1,200 feet in breadth and 96 feet in height, big enough to span four football fields. In shallow water, the nets drag along the sea floor like bulldozers clear-felling a forest. Up to 15% of the catch is unwanted marine life, thrown back into the water dead.
West African fishing boats are wooden pirogues, 12 feet long, with an outboard motor and a crew of two or three. The trawler’s target fish is mainly sardinella, the bread-and-butter of these fishermen. Since local waters have been opened to super-trawlers, stocks have so reduced that many local fishermen can no longer sustain themselves. While super-trawlers owned by Irish millionaires, supported by Irish banks, vacuum away their livelihood, the Irish public digs in its pockets to provide them with food aid.
Is not this rape of the world’s seas a crime? But where does the crime begin? Netting anchovies by the teeming millions and then turning them into fertiliser, ploughing them into the land? It may be argued that this ‘terrestrial-ises’ the sea’s bounty; it literally ‘lands’ the catch.
Landed, it becomes Man’s property alone where, before, it was that of a thousand creatures that are not Man, the predators of the ocean, the whales, sharks, seals.
But we do not, as a species, have a record of making this world an Eden. Wars are a constant; now, we lay waste the seas; if fish were humans, we would call it genocide. We wipe out entire species, to our own ends. The kids know this is wrong. While our banks finance the Atlantic Dawn and our government licences it to rape other people’s patrimony, the kids try not to waste, to conserve the stock. It is not enough for us to teach them to cherish the natural world. As voting adults, we have a duty to tell governments that the wealth of the seas must be preserved and passed on.
