Something's fishy as Europe dines By Elisabeth Rosenthal Monday, January 14, 2008 c/o IHT

Something's fishy as Europe dines
By Elisabeth Rosenthal

Monday, January 14, 2008
LONDON: Surrounded by parrot fish, doctor fish, butter fish, Effa Edusie is engulfed by pieces of her childhood in Ghana. Caught the day before far off the coast of West Africa, they have been airfreighted to London for dinner.

Edusie's relatives used to be fishermen. But no more. These fish are no longer caught by Africans.

Under the waterlogged brown cardboard box that holds the snapper is the improbable red logo of Chinese National Fisheries, one of the largest suppliers of West African fish to Europe. Europe's dinner tables are increasingly supplied by global fishing fleets that are depleting the world's oceans to feed the ravenous consumers who have become fish's most effective predators.

Fish is now the most traded animal commodity on the planet, with a global turnover of more than 100 million tons each year. Europe has suddenly become the world's largest market for fish, each year worth more than €14 billion. Europe's appetite has grown as its native fish stocks have shrunk, so that 60 percent of fish sold in Europe now needs to be imported, according to the European Union.

"So much of fishing is motivated by consumer demand," said Rupert Howes, chief executive of the Marine Stewardship Council, a private global group. "The world wants more seafood at a time when 50 percent of stocks are exploited as hard as we can and 25 percent overexploited. There is a real disconnect."

In Europe, the imbalance between supply and demand has led to a thriving illegal trade. About 50 percent of the fish sold in the EU originates in developing nations, and much of it is laundered like contraband, caught and shipped illegally beyond the limits of government quotas or treaties. It is a well-financed, sophisticated smuggling operation, carried out by large-scale mechanized fishing fleets able to sweep up more fish than ever, chasing threatened stocks from ocean to ocean.

The European Commission estimates that more than €1.1 billion worth, or $1.6 billion, of illegal seafood enters Europe each year. The World Wildlife Fund says that up to half of fish sold in Europe is illegal.

While some of the "pirate fishing" is carried out by foreign vessels far afield, European ships are also guilty, some of them operating close to home. An estimated 40 percent of cod caught in the Baltic Sea is illegal, said Mireille Thom, spokeswoman for the European Union's Fisheries and Maritime Affairs commissioner, Joe Borg.

"We know that it's much too easy to land illegal fish in European ports, and we are really eager to block their access to European markets," Thom said.

If cost is an indication, fish is poised to become Europe's most precious contraband: Prices have doubled and tripled in response to surging demand, scarcity and recent fishing quotas imposed by the EU in a desperate effort to save native species.

In London, a kilogram of the lowly cod, the central ingredient of fish and chips, now costs £30, or $60, up from £6 four years ago.

"Fish and chips used to be a poor man's treat, but with the prices its becoming a delicacy," said Mark Morris, a fishmonger for 20 years in London's vast Billingsgate market.

In Billingsgate on a wintry morning last month at 5 a.m., as wholesalers unpack fresh fish from all over the world, the vast international trade that feeds Europe's appetite was readily apparent, even if the origins of each filet and steak was not.

Less than 24 hours before, many of these fish on sale were passing through the port of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, a port with five inspectors to evaluate 360,000 tons of perishable fish that must move rapidly through each year. The Canaries, a Spanish archipelago off the coast of Morocco, have become the favored landing point of illegal fish as well as people.

Once cleared there, the catch has entered the EU and can be sold anywhere within it without further inspection. By the time West African fish get to Europe, the legal fish is offered for sale alongside the ill-gotten.

"In the fish area, we're so far behind meat where you can trace it back to the origins," said Heike Vesper, who directs the World Wide Fund for Nature Fisheries Campaign.

The long distances and chain of fishermen and traders make that a difficult task, and every effort to regulate catches, it seems, pushes fishing fleets to other regions.

"There are quotas in Europe, and with air freight cheap it's much more globalized," Morris said. "we don't order ourselves - there are middlemen."

At Billingsgate, for instance, the colorful boxes of shrimp called African Beauty, bearing a drawing of a beautiful woman in tribal dress, were fished in Madagascar and processed in France.

"Ten years ago it was just from Britain, Norway and Iceland," said Morris, whose family has been in the fishmongering business for generations.

But many kinds of fish, like tuna and swordfish and cod, are not available in European waters anymore. In September, the European Commission banned the fishing of endangered bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean for the rest of 2007. Such rules barely slow the industry.

"There isn't a market we can't access anymore," said Lee Fawcitt, selling tuna from Sri Lanka, salmon and cod from Norway, halibut from Canada, tilapia from China, shrimp from Madagascar and snapper from Indonesia and Senegal.

To many traders the origin of the fish hardly matters. "We try to do something, but once it's here, my attitude is that if its been caught it should be sold." Fawcitt said. "I'd hate to see it being thrown away."

Tracing where the fish comes from is nearly impossible, many experts say. Groups like Greenpeace and the Environmental Justice Foundation have documented a range of egregious and illegal fishing practices off West Africa.

Huge boats, owned by companies in China, South Korea and Europe, fly flags of convenience from other nations. They stay at sea for years at a time, fishing, fueling, changing crews and offloading their catches to refrigerated boats at sea, making international monitoring extremely difficult.

Even when permits and treaties make the fishing legal, it is not always environmentally sustainable. Many fleets far overstep the bounds of their agreements in any case, studies show, generally with total impunity.

Under international law, the country where the boat is registered is responsible for disciplining illegal activity. Many of the ships fly flags from distant landlocked countries that collect registration fees but put a low priority on enforcement.

When the Environmental Justice Foundation, which has studied the fishing industry, teamed up with a Greenpeace boat last year, more that half of 104 vessels it followed off the coast of Guinea were fishing illegally or were involved in illegal practices, they said.

Their cameras recorded boats whose names were hidden to prevent reporting; boats whose names were changed week to week, presumably to comply with a name on a permit; the catch from a licensed boat being offloaded in the dead of night to another vessel, so that the boat could start fishing again.

"There's a big competition out there with foreign vessels, especially from China," said Moshwood Kuku, a fishmonger at Afikala Afrikane, a stall that specializes in African fish at Billingsgate. "Locals can only fish the coast."

Chinese National Fisheries, which first sent boats to the Atlantic in 1985, now has offices up and down the coast of West Africa, accounting for more than half its international offices. It also has a huge compound in Las Palmas.

While small local fishermen in West Africa tend to fish sustainably, large seagoing boats use practices that are dangerous to the environment, particularly their habit of trawling the seabed with vast nets.

The nets destroy coral, and unsettle eggs and fish breeding grounds. They gulp up fish that cannot be sold because they are too small. Their competition decimates local fishing industries.

By the time huge mechanized vessels have thrown the unsellable juveniles back into the sea, they are often dead, bringing stocks another step closer to extinction. Of the estimated 90 million tons of fish caught each year, about 30 million tons are discarded, Vesper of the World Wide Fund for Nature said.

Many experts feel that a better way to control overfishing is to end the system of flags of convenience, to close Las Palmas and to improve port inspections. But enforcement requires resources, and that will most likely only push fish prices even higher.

The European Union is exploring the idea of requiring officials at its ports to check with officials from countries where boats are registered to make sure they are legal and have fishing rights. They are proposing to provide financial assistance for more enforcement in developing countries.

In the short term, prices will be higher. Procuring genuinely sustainable fish means buying more expensive fish or not eating fish at all.

"We've acted as if the supply of fish was limitless, and it's not," said Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental Justice Foundation.

"In wealthy urban areas like London, we're going to have to pay more for fish we know is sustainably caught. Unlike in Guinea, we're not depending on fish for employment and protein."