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  PlanetArk 28 Feb 06
Greenpeace to Expose Illegal Fishing on Africa Coast

CAPE TOWN - Greenpeace activists set out from Cape Town harbour on Monday to expose illegal fishing off Africa's west coast which, they say, takes fish worth billions of dollars every year.

The environmentalists intend to search the seas for pirate fishing vessels, filming and documenting their activities thus facilitating future prosecutions.

The expedition, a partnership with the London-based Environmental Justice Foundation, is part of a wider campaign to help save the world's oceans and follows two months of confrontations with Japanese whalers in the icy Antarctic seas.

"There is pirate fishing in every ocean every day," Greenpeace spokeswoman Sarah Holden told reporters aboard the group's flagship vessel, Esperanza, in Cape Town's harbour. "There is a good chance that the fish that is on your plate was stolen from someone else," she said.

Conservationists say vessels from foreign nations often decimate stocks that could have been utilised by poor coastal people - hence the term "stolen". Pirate fishing is the common term for what is officially known as illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, which complicates the management of fish stock and compounds ecosystem problems.

The United Nations estimates around 75 percent of the world's fisheries have been fished to their limits, and west Africa's coast is seen as a target for pirates as the region's countries have few resources to protect marine life or enforce regulations at sea.

Greenpeace says pirate fishing is worth between $4 billion and $9 billion a year and accounts for about 20 percent of the world's total fish catch. The organisation estimates illegal fishing strips about $1 billion worth of fish from sub-Saharan African waters alone.

"We want to draw attention to this ... there are a large number of companies that simply aren't doing anything about it," Holden said.

She said the fish caught are often transferred to refrigerated cargo ships at sea and then "laundered" through legal ports and sold on into the market.
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