Original von Carsten
Information from Greenpeace
Federated States of Micronesia — While most of the team had been busy on official Defending Our Oceans business, Alex had come across evidence of a lucrative shark finning operation in a warehouse less than 100 metres from where the Esperanza had been docked. Maarten and I joined him and we spent the remaining two and a half hours in Pohnpei trying to unravel what was going on.
Refrigerated warehouses in harbours are not unusual. Nor are piles of dead fish waiting for export. What was strange was the pile of frozen finless shark carcasses. Sharks are frequently an ‘incidental’ catch of the tuna fishing industry. Such sharks are termed ‘bycatch’, and for an incidental catch they’re good luck. While the body of the shark is worth almost nothing, sets of shark fins sell for US$700 per Kg. That is 70 times the value of a kilo of tuna.
An expensive, tasteless tonic
The fins are dried and sold for use in shark fin soup, a traditional Chinese dish which sells for upwards of US$100 a bowl. Hong Kong is the centre of the shark fin industry with 70% of the world’s shark fins ending up there. As the Chinese economy improves demand for sharks’ fins is increasing by 5% a year.
Legal shark finning
For fishing boats with limited holds and long times at sea, shark carcasses are a waste of space. Sharks caught as bycatch can be legally stripped of their fins – so the bodies can be stored in a smaller space, and the valuable fins dried fresh while still at sea.
Illegal shark finning
Abuse occurs when sharks are specifically targeted, their fins removed and their bodies thrown back into the sea. This practice, known as shark finning, is barbaric and wasteful. Often the shark is still alive, while its fins are hacked off with a sharp knife, leaving it in agony. The shark’s finless body is then dumped overboard and, being unable to swim, it drowns or dies of starvation. Although shark meat is low value compared to its fins, it is still edible and its liver and skin are highly prized in certain parts of the world. Shark finning targets only 2-5% of the shark’s body mass and wastes the remaining 95%.
Shark finning around the world
Shark finning has been banned in the European Union since 2003, and is illegal in the US and Eastern Pacific. However, there are some serious loopholes in the legislation. The amount of sharks caught incidentally varies according to fishing method and circumstance. So, it is impossible to determine exactly how many sharks have been caught unintentionally. For Longline fishing vessels – which set a line up to 100km long, baited with up to 3,000 hooks - incidental catch ranges from almost nothing to around 20%. For Purse-seiners 40-50% is typical. When fishing vessels come into ports such as Pohnpei, they must show their logbooks,-a record how much of each fish species they have caught - to officials.
If the weight of shark carcasses is within the expected range for the fishing method, the haul is assumed to be incidental bycatch. A further loophole surrounds the issue of the fins being cut from the shark’s carcass. Obviously, there should only be one set of fins per carcass. However, the assessment is made by weight, not number.
Determining whether the finning is legal or illegal
The weight of the fins as a proportion of body weight varies between different species of shark. The World Conservation Union (IUCN) estimate shark fins comprise, on average, 2 % of body weight. This means one would expect 20kg of shark fin for every ton of shark carcass. The US allows up to 5% total shark weight to be fins – this means that for sharks with a low fin to body weight, more than one shark could be illegally finned and dumped for each declared shark. Earlier this week the European parliament rejected a call by its Fisheries Committee to increase the EU's legal ratio of fins to carcasses form 5 to 6.5%. This would have allowed more than two-thirds of sharks caught to be undeclared – opening a back door to the shark finning industry. The European Parliament is now calling instead for a decrease in the ratio toa scientifically acceptable 2%.
The story in Pohnpei
The refrigerated warehouse in Pohnpei belonged to a Hong Kong based company called Luen Thai. In addition to over 60 finned shark carcases, the warehouse contained a few hundred frozen yellowfin tuna, 6 marlin and 2 moonfish. I spoke to one of the workers, who told me that the company runs 13 Longliners. Each stays at sea for about 3 weeks, catches around 300 tons of tuna and in the process 2 tons of shark. The products section of Luen Thai’s website lists four species of tuna and eleven commercially valuable species of fish that are presumably frequently caught as bycatch.
The mystery
Legal shark fining is brutal, but no more so than commercial fishing and with incidental catch rates of 0.67% it has little commercial value. Moreover, shark carcasses reek and are almost worthless - so, why keep over 60 of them in a refrigerated warehouse on the harbour front? Curiosity got the better of us, so we asked the guys working there what they were going to do with the sharks. Initially no one could come up with an answer, then they said the carcasses were going overseas somewhere, perhaps to be made into fish balls. With transport costs being as high as they are this didn’t seem plausible.
By the time Maarten turned up with the video camera, the managers had arrived. They explained that the freezer was broken and that they planned to move the sharks. This made no sense, if the freezer in the warehouse was broken, why not rescue the high value tuna, moonfish and blue marlin? Instead the men set to work shifting over sixty worthless shark carcasses to a refrigerated van. The extreme responses to our cameras, suggest another motive.
Could the shark carcasses be resident incidental bycatch, always available to counted against fins caught illegally? Perhaps the 2 tons of shark was a reference to the weight of fins collected, and not total weight. This is not so unusual. Earlier this year two Spanish Longliners landed 8 tons of shark fins in Suva, Fiji. With an estimated value of US $5.6 million this far exceeds the value of the tuna they would have caught.
Unexpected impacts
Illegal shark finning has a detrimental impact on ocean ecosystems; sometimes with a direct impact on fish stocks. Many sharks are top predators and as such their eating habits keep the structure and species composition of marine ecosystems in balance. Removal of sharks from an ecosystem can have complicated and unexpected results. For example, it has been found that the removal of tiger sharks from a tropical ecosystem resulted in a decline in the tuna population. The decline was because the sharks had kept populations of other predators of tuna in check.
Eradicating shark finning is humane, beneficial for sharks, for fisheries management and for all of us who depend on the health of our oceans. It is yet another example of the needless waste of ocean life, and the need for properly enforced marine reserves.
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i would like to add some information on ESPERANZA_
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3XMWVjA554&eurl=
The Esperanza (Spanish for "hope") is the latest and largest vessel in the Greenpeace fleet. She was named by none other than our cyberactivists.
The ship was built in Poland in 1984 and was one of 14 Russian fire fighting vessels. (The ship still bears the marks of her Russian past, such as Russian Cyrillic lettering on the control panels.) She was refitted and renamed the "Esperanza" in 2002, following a global competition among our online supporters (the "Cyberactivists") to nominate and then vote on her name. She was launched in Cape Town in a ceremony where she was blessed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
At 72 metres and with a top speed of 15 knots, the ship is ideal for fast and long range work. Her ice class status means we can also work in polar regions.
Travel with the Esperanza - Visit the webcam on the bow of the ship to see where she is right now!
The Crew
There are 19 multinational members of the crew, but up to 40 people can be on board including researchers, campaigners and scientists.
Ship Features
When the ship was refitted a number of improvements were made to make the ship environmentally friendly and technologically advanced. These include:
* The removal or safe containment of all asbestos
* Fitting a special fuel system to avoid spillage
* A heating system that recycles the waste energy produced by the engines
* TBT-free hull paint
* Ammonia-based refrigeration and air-conditioning rather than climate changing and ozone depleting Freon gas
* An economic propulsion mode which limits the emission of greenhouse gases
Defending Our Oceans
Since her launch, the Esperanza and her crew have had a special connection with our oceans. In 2005 alone, she was instrumental in many campaigns to defend ocean life including taking action against dolphin-killing pair trawlers in the English Channel, scientific research on The Mingulay reef complex off Scotland, action against bottom trawling in the North Atlantic, and promoting marine reserves in the North Sea.
During this expedition the Esperanza will be the home, office and workshop for the crew in some of the most remote regions of the world and is equipped with a top class communications system.
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i would like to add some information on greenpeace' rainbow warrior :
The first Rainbow Warrior
The first Rainbow Warrior, a craft of 40 metres and 418 tonnes, was originally the MAFF trawler Sir William Hardy, launched in 1955. She was acquired for £40,000 and was renovated over four months, then re-launched on April 29, 1978 as Rainbow Warrior. The engines were replaced in 1981 and the ship was converted with a ketch rig in 1985.
Rainbow Warrior was used as a support vessel for many Greenpeace protest activities against seal hunting, whaling and nuclear weapons testing during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In early 1985 she was in the Pacific campaigning against nuclear testing. At the beginning of the year she evacuated some Marshall Islanders who were living on an atoll polluted by radioactivity from past American nuclear tests at the Pacific Proving Grounds.
She travelled to New Zealand to lead a flotilla of yachts protesting against French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago of French Polynesia. During previous nuclear tests at Mururoa, protest ships had been boarded by French commandos after "trespassing" into the shipping exclusion zone around the atoll. For the 1985 tests Greenpeace intended to monitor the impact of nuclear tests and place protesters on the island to do some monitoring, in violation of the law. The French Government infiltrated the Canada-based organisation and discovered these plans.
[edit] The bombing
Main article: Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
The Rainbow Warrior, then captained by Peter Willcox, was sabotaged and sunk just before midnight NZST (1pm BST, 8am EDT) on July 10, 1985 by two explosive devices attached to the hull by operatives of French intelligence (DGSE). One of the twelve people on board, photographer Fernando Pereira, drowned when he attempted to retrieve his equipment.
The New Zealand Police immediately initiated a murder inquiry into the sinking. With the assistance of the New Zealand public and an intense media focus the police quickly established the movements of all of the bombers. On July 12 two of the six bombers, posing as Swiss tourists and carrying Swiss Passports, who had operated under orders were found and arrested. At trial they pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were eventually sentenced to a maximum of 10 years imprisonment. Most of the others were identified and three were interviewed by the New Zealand Police on Norfolk Island to where they had escaped in the yacht Ouvea. They were not arrested due to lack of evidence that would satisfy the Australian authorities. Ouvea subsequently sailed, ostensibly for Nouméa, but was scuttled en route with the personnel transferring to a French naval vessel. Most of the terrorists remained in French government service.
In September 1985 the French minister of defense Charles Hernu resigned and prime minister Laurent Fabius admitted, on television, that agents of the French secret service had sunk the boat on orders.
After the conviction and imprisonment of the two French agents France threatened to block New Zealand exports to the European Economic Community (EU) unless the two were released. In June 1986, in a political deal with the then Prime Minister of New Zealand David Lange and presided over by the United Nations Secretary-General, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, France agreed to pay compensation of NZ$13 million (USD$6.5 million) to New Zealand and 'apologise', in return for which Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur would be detained at the French military base on Hao atoll for three years. However, the two spies had both returned to France by May 1988, after less than two years on the atoll. Mafart having ostensibly travelled to France for medical treatment (without returning at the conclusion at the treatment) and Prieur having become pregnant after her husband had been allowed to join her.
In 1987, under heavy international pressure, the French government paid $8.16 million compensation to Greenpeace. In 2005 Admiral Pierre Lacoste, head of DGSE at the time, admitted that the death weighed heavily on his conscience and said that the aim of the operation had not been to kill. He acknowledged the existence of three teams: the crew of the yacht, reconnaissance and logistics (those successfully prosecuted), plus a two-man team that carried out the actual bombing and whose identities have never been officially confirmed [1].
In September 2006 the French newspaper Le Parisien identified Gérard Royal, brother to Ségolène Royal the leading Socialist presidential candidate, as being the person who actually planted the limpet mines. On the twentieth anniversary of the sinking it was also revealed that the French president François Mitterrand, himself, had given authorisation for the bombing.[2].
Also, in 2005 following release of UK government papers, it was confirmed that the French government tried to use French media to imply that the UK's MI6 was involved in the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior [3].
Rainbow Warrior was refloated on 21 August 1985 and moved to a naval harbour for forensic examination. Although the hull had been recovered the damage was too extensive for economic repair and the vessel was scuttled in Matauri Bay in the Cavalli Islands, New Zealand on 2 December 1987, to serve as a dive wreck and fish sanctuary. The move was seen as a fitting end for the vessel. Indeed, the hull is now covered with a large colony of vari-coloured sea anemones.[4]
The original masts of the Rainbow Warrior currently stand outside the Dargaville Museum.
