Read my colleague Stephanie Joyces fantastic Bloomberg piece on illegal crab fishing off Russia. Great story. -Erika Finding a ship that doesn’t want to be found is almost impossible on Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk, 600,000 square miles of icy water north of Japan, and the Iskander was doing its best to remain hidden. The rusting hull of the 180-foot ship bore no name, and its transmitters had been disabled. In the right light, it might have disappeared into the low-hanging clouds that often blanket the waters off Russia’s east coast. But it didn’t. According to a November 2013 incident report, the Border Guard Service of Russia—the functional equivalent of the U.S. Coast Guard—first tried hailing the unidentified ship. There was a moment of static before a response from the vessel crackled over the radio: SRTM-K Breeze. That is not, in fact, one of the ship’s many names, which in the last five years has gone by Afeliy, Costa Rapida, Status, and, most recently, Iskander. But what is a pirate to say? The conversation didn’t last. The exchange had barely ended when the Iskander’s engines cranked to full throttle, and the vessel began to pull away. When attempts to intercept it failed, the border patrol fired warning shots, pocking the water behind the ship. These went unheeded. The Iskander continued to run, the border patrol chased, and meanwhile, the crew frantically dumped its cargo of live king crab overboard. Exactly how long the chase lasted is unclear, but “after exhausting all other means,” the border patrol report says, the commander had his gunners fire a second round. These weren’t warning shots. As the bullets flew past the Iskander’s wheelhouse, the ship finally slowed to a stop. Out in the middle of the ocean, the border patrol agents clambered aboard the Cambodian-flagged fishing vessel, rounded up the 18 crew members—14 Russians and 4 Indonesians—and turned the ship toward Petropavlovsk, the capital of Russia’s easternmost province, Kamchatka. It wouldn’t stay there long. The Iskander is one of an unknown number of ships full of nameless fishermen who poach crab valued at more than $700 million from Russia’s waters every year, according to the Russian government. They’re part of the bigger, global industry of pirate fishing, which the conservation group Oceana estimates takes at least $10 billion—and maybe more than double that—of seafood a year from the world’s waters in violation of various national and international laws. The crab poachers are also a key part of the global supply chain. King crab legally harvested in Alaska mostly goes to Asia, where it fetches a higher price, while cheaper king crab from Russia gets imported to the U.S. to fulfill domestic demand. The last major bust of an importer occurred in 2011, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association seized $2.5 million in illegal king crab from a Seattle storage facility belonging to an American company called Harbor Seafood. (While a similar dollar value of cocaine carries a minimum 10-year prison sentence, no charges were filed in that case. Harbor Seafood, which claimed to have no knowledge the crab was illegal, bought the confiscated seafood back at auction.)
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 18:39:22 +0000
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