Chagos Islands, illegal fishing and war

This video from Britain is called My Island Home – Chagos Islands.

From Wildlife Extra:

Illegal fishing inside Chagos Marine Reserve

Greenpeace finds illegal fishing vessels & urges UK to enforce Chagos marine reserve

October 2012. Greenpeace found two illegal Sri Lankan fishing boats inside the Chagos Marine Reserve and has called on the UK government to enforce protection of this Indian Ocean reserve from pirate fishing.

Rainbow Warrior

The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is currently transiting from Mauritius to the Maldives as part of its Indian Ocean expedition and found in total three fishing boats deep within the Chagos Marine Protected Area, established by the UK government in 2010.

Dozens of sharks & tuna

Onboard one vessel, identified as IMUL-A-0352KLT, Greenpeace found dozens of sharks, including thresher sharks, a protected species in this region. This boat is not on the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC) list of registered vessels and is illegal. A second boat, identified as IMUL-A-12939MTR, was not on the IOTC list either and is illegal. Greenpeace also boarded that vessel, mainly finding skipjack tuna.

Gillnets and longlines

These fishing boats use indiscriminate gillnets and longlines to catch sharks, tuna and other marine life.

“We are demanding the UK government inspect these vessels and actively protect the marine reserve from illegal fishing. Without enforcement this protected area is not worth the paper it is written on,” said Greenpeace UK oceans campaigner Simon Clydesdale on board the Rainbow Warrior.

Greenpeace has given the details of the vessels to the regional authorities as well as the Foreign Office in London, urging Britain to send its patrol vessel the Pacific Marlin out from the nearby US military base Diego Garcia, where it was believed to be at anchor, to inspect the three vessels.

I mainly agree with this article. Yet, only this sentence of it deals with a problem even worse for the Chagos islands than illegal fishing: the Diego Garcia military base. To build that base, the inhabitants of the Chagos islands were forcibly driven away from their homeland; and they are still not allowed to return. Like military bases in general, that base is bad for the environment. Diego Garcia base has been used for torture. It has been used for war in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. And now, it may be used for yet another bloody war against Iran (fortunately, the London and Washington governments do not seem to be on the same page yet about this; and I hope that they never will).

Greenpeace encountered a third vessel, identified as IMUL-A-0341KLT. This boat was authorised to fish in the region but not inside the Chagos protected area.

“Illegal fishing is a massive problem in the Indian Ocean. It is stealing from coastal communities and plunders marine life such as sharks.

As I noted, in the Chagos islands, the “coastal communities”, the Chagos islanders, were forcibly driven away to build the military base.

Boats that repeatedly fail to comply with the rules must be stopped. Our oceans need fewer fishing vessels that are properly controlled if we are to reverse the current overfishing crisis,” said Greenpeace International oceans campaigner Sari Tolvanen.

Greenpeace is calling on key market players and tuna brands to ensure they have a traceable supply chain and only source tuna that is legal and comes from sustainable sources.

The Rainbow Warrior is continuing its mission in the Indian Ocean to highlight the problems associated with excessive tuna fishing, unsustainable fishing practices, and the need for countries to cooperate and ensure that communities will benefit from the wealth coming from the oceans in the future.

Related articles

• Stop overfishing off Masbate, CamSur, Greenpeace urges gov’t (newsinfo.inquirer.net)
• Saving our seas: Jellyfish, slime and the Chagos Islanders (blogs.independent.co.uk)
• The Tale of an Island: Imperialism in Action (onestrugglesouthflorida.wordpress.com)
• Rainbow Warrior visiting Maldives as part of two month Indian Ocean tour (minivannews.com)
• Aaron Gray-Block: Joining the Rainbow Warrior (huffingtonpost.com)
• A bit fishy: Greenpeace hits out (smh.com.au)
• Marine Protected Areas skyrocket (bbc.co.uk)
• Fish: Illegal fishing persists in Barbuda waters (antiguaobserver.com)
• Protecting Noa’s Ark (greenpeace.org)

Corporate fish poaching in Senegal

This video is called Senegalese sharks threatened by overfishing.

From Greenpeace International (Amsterdam, the Netherlands):

Senegal: Greenpeace Releases Groundbreaking Report On Senegal Sardinella Plunder

10 October 2012

Press release

Dakar — Today marks the launch of a groundbreaking Greenpeace report detailing the plunger of Senegal’s small pelagic resources by foreign trawler fleets.

The 20 page report, covering a 25 month period between March 2010 and April this year, is titled ‘The plunder of a nation’s birthright: A drama in five acts’ and lays bare the extent to which foreign fleets have sidestepped international and local laws to get permits legalizing their pillage of traditional fishing grounds.

“Because of greed and bad governance, future Senegalese generations might well never know the fish species which their ancestors took as their birthright, losing both a much-needed source of animal protein and job opportunities that their parents and grandparents enjoyed for centuries’, said Ahmed Diamé, Greenpeace Africa’s Oceans Campaigner.

Small pelagic fishing is the main part of the local fishing industry, accounting for 70% of all landings, but the entire sector is in imminent danger of irretrievable collapse – due to the foreign factory ships which lie off shore, ensuring that the pelagic catch is not even landed in Senegal any more, but exported directly abroad.

Scientists at CECAF-FAO have been fighting a losing battle to warn West African states and their governments of the danger of overfishing of certain pelagic species, particularly Sardinella, but Greenpeace has found that officials in the industry have been issuing permits legalizing the fishing of these species. To make matters worse, the Senegalese government department in charge of public finance has hardly seen a franc from the license fees.

Greenpeace has also established that foreign owners are paying officials within the department of public finance US$35 per tonne which is less than anywhere else in West Africa and in direct contravention of an agreement signed in 2011, when a Russian delegation committed to paying $100 per tonne. A manager of the Murmansk trawler fleet recently told Russian media that the company was now paying $120 per tonne.

Effectively, the people and state of Senegal have been robbed of $15 million in the last year, based on official figures of 52 000 ton catches in 2011 and 125 000 tons caught during this year’s early season.

“Today, Greenpeace demands that the Government of Senegal immediately establish a commission of enquiry into this theft of public resources, to enable prosecutors to build criminal cases against all the players; individuals and companies, involved and not just stop this practice, but also recoup the monies stolen from the people”, continued Diame.

“The only sustainable answer, not just for Senegal, but the entire West African community, is for governments to implement the minim basic requirements, underpinned by transparency and good governance, not just to protect the fisheries, but also to sustain it for the benefit of the very people it is supposed to feed, employ and support”, concluded Diame.

Weak Swedish nuclear security

This video is about two Swedish Greenpeace activists, inside the Forsmark nuclear plant for 38 hours. The YouTube text of the video says, translated into English:

After 38 hours inside the Forsmark plant, without security personnel managing to find them, Rasmus Törnqvist and Atte Aholainen voluntarily went out themselves.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Activists hide out at nuclear sites

Wednesday 10 October 2012

by Our Foreign Desk

Shocking security lapses at Swedish nuclear plants were laid bare today as four activists were arrested after spending 28 hours hiding undiscovered at one site.

They were part of a 22-strong group which broke the chains of an outer gate and cycled into the Ringhals reactor site in the south-west of the country on Tuesday morning.

Another 50 used ladders to scale the perimeter fences of the Forsmark site on the eastern coast, where most were arrested soon after their illegal entry.

Campaigner Lauri Myllyvirta said he had spent all night on the roof of the Ringhals plant with three other activists and were only discovered when Greenpeace Sweden decided to tell the media they were there.

Environmental group Greenpeace said it carried out the trespass to highlight the danger lax security posed to the more than 1.3 million people living within 75 kilometres (47 miles) of the sites.

Their “stress test” came in response to an EU report last week showing massive safety shortcomings at almost all of the 134 nuclear reactors in Europe.

“The lack of safety was proven already by the EU stress tests but they didn’t test for people to get in illegally, which should have been included,” Greenpeace spokeswoman Birgitte Lesanner said.

Greenpeace said two activists were still at large today in the grounds of the Forsmark power station.

A fire broke out in a Ringhals reactor last year after staff had left a vacuum cleaner in the containment building.

Shell threatens Arctic, Greenpeace protests

This is a Dutch video about Greenpeace in the Netherlands, protesting against Shell drilling for oil in the vulnerable Arctic.

Biggest meatpacking corporation ‘endangering Amazon’

This video is called Wildlife of the Amazon Rainforest.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

World’s largest meat packer ‘breaking deal on Amazon‘

Thursday 07 June 2012

Greenpeace accused the world’s largest meatpacking company on Thursday of breaking an agreement to protect the Amazon rainforest by not buying cattle from suppliers who raise beef on illegally deforested land.

Brazilian company JBS denied the claim and said it would sue Greenpeace.

The environmental group said it based its accusations on observations by its field investigators and information obtained from Ibama, Brazil’s environmental protection agency.

“Greenpeace has found, once again, numerous new cases of JBS purchasing cattle directly and indirectly from farms involved in illegal deforestation, invasion of protected areas and indigenous lands, and farms using slave labour,” the group said.

In 2009, JBS and three of Brazil’s other major meatpackers and leather exporters signed Greenpeace-brokered agreements promising to not buy cattle from farms involved in illegal deforestation or that relied upon the work of people mired in debt-slavery.

Most of Amazon Rainforest’s Species Extinctions Are Yet to Come: here.