Greenpeace: Mauritius, Indian Ocean Haven for Pirate Fishing Vessels

Mauritius:
Indian Ocean Haven for Pirate Fishing Vessels

Download a .pdf version of the report and its appendix.

Report Contents

What is Pirate Fishing?

Causes
Evading detection

Pirate Fishing and the Southern Ocean

Impacts:
Toothfish
Seabirds

The emergence of the toothfish fishery

Mauritius: Pirate Port

The Salvora Case

International Efforts

Mauritius: still harbouring pirates

Pirate Fishing: global problem

Mauritius:
challenge and opportunity

Also, check out our Pirates Gallery to see Greenpeace's list of recent activity in Mauritius

The most blatant cause of global overfishing and waste is the unregulated growth in the number of large-scale, capital- and technology-intensive fishing vessels in the world’s fishing fleet.

“Information now available, such as historical records of landings of toothfish at ports of Namibia and Mauritius and import figures for the USA and Japan, clearly confirms earlier reports presented by my delegation, of very high levels of such fishing in the Southern Indian Ocean sector of the Convention area.

“The permanent damage that has already caused, for example, in the South Africa EEZ around the Prince Edward Islands where catch rates have fallen to about 10% of their initial levels, regrettably now only bears testimony to our collective inability to effectively address this serious problem, both as individual states and as a Commission.”

- South African delegate speaking during the November 1999 meeting of CCAMLR.

Causes of pirate fishing

Most commercially valuable species of fish are being ruthlessly over-exploited, while other fish species of little commercial value, and other marine wildlife such as marine mammals, seabirds, sharks and sea turtles are slaughtered as “by-catch”.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UN FAO), some 70% of the world’s fisheries are either over- exploited, fully- exploited, depleted or slowly recovering. Adding to the problem is the enormous waste of industrialised fishing fleets, which discard about 27 million tonnes of the fish they catch each year. That is, one-quarter of the annual marine fish catch is thrown overboard dead.

The most blatant cause of global overfishing and waste is the unregulated growth in the number of large-scale, capital- and technology-intensive fishing vessels in the world’s fishing fleet. Because this fleet has grown so large and so fast, fish catches in most traditional fishing areas of the world have declined dramatically in recent years.

Consequently, more and more fishing companies are sending out their industrial fleets to hunt down new fish stocks in hitherto remote or unfished regions. Many vessel owners operate as pirates, requiring their crews to deliberately flout international laws devised to protect and conserve fish stocks. A “gold rush” mentality has developed and attention focused on the unregulated areas of the high seas, particularly the remote Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica.

Pirates operate world-over, from Antarctica to the Mediterranean, from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific. They move from fishery to fishery catching as much fish as they can. They are driving many species to extinction.

How do pirates evade detection?
What is pirate fishing?

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