Our 25 metre long 'No Fish No Future' banner looks tiny alongside the giant Albatun Tres
After last week's good news about Pacific Island nations banding together to stop foreign fishing fleets decimating their tuna stocks, the crew of Esperanza yesterday took action against the biggest and most devastatingly efficient tuna catching vessel in the world, the Spanish owned purse seiner Albatun Tres.
This is a boat so big that it's known as a 'super, super seiner'. It can net more than 3,000 tonnes of tuna in a single fishing trip - almost double the entire annual catch of some Pacific countries. Yet still unsatisfied, the Spanish owners of this ocean giant are looking to bring even more vessels to fish in the region.
Over the last five days, the Esperanza followed the Albatun Tres across over 1,000 nautical miles, during which time no fishing took place. But yesterday the seiner was caught deploying its net inside Phoenix Islands of Kiribati, a proposed Marine Protected Area. Activists laid a 25-metre floating banner reading 'No Fish, No Future' into the net in an attempt to prevent it from being hauled in. In the event the haul was delayed, but not prevented.
The Albatun Tres is owned by Albacora, a large Spanish tuna company which is part of OPAGAC, a powerful association of Spanish tuna boat owners, processors and traders. Their super seiners have a questionable history in the region. Some boats represented by OPAGAC (including the Albatun Tres) fish under an EU agreement with Kiribati. By the terms of that agreement, no private licences can be issued to vessels sailing under an EU nation's flag. To get round this OPAGAC sails nine of its boats under South American flags of convenience, some of which were caught pirate fishing last year.
According to our oceans campaigner Lagi Toribau, the fishing industry is following a business model that wipes out its own long-term viability for short-term profit.
"Pacific tuna stocks are in decline and there simply isn't enough fish in the sea to fill the holds of these huge vessels. Adding more vessels to those already allowed to fish guarantees that there will be no fish left for the future."
The Esperanza has been in the region for the last eight weeks to highlight the fact that tuna stocks are being overfished, hurting the ocean's ecosystems and making scarce one of the Pacific Islanders' key food sources. During that time, her crew have intervened (in a non-violent way, of course) against fishing fleets from Taiwan, Korea, the US, the Philippines and now Spain.
