Activists bust pirate tuna fishing

This Philippines-flagged vessel was at the site of a transfer of tuna between her sister vessel and a refrigerated mothership, the Kenken 888. It is likely that a transfer of fish at sea involving an illegal vessel was about to occur, but the arrival of Greenpeace prevented it from taking place as the vessels immediately separated and fled.

"Transfers of fish at sea are well known to be facilitating pirate fishing around the world - now we have proof of this in the Pacific and it is unacceptable that this is still allowed to continue," said Greenpeace Australia Pacific campaigner Lagi Toribau on board the Esperanza. "Transfers of fish should only be allowed in port so they can be monitored properly."

"At-sea transfers result in massive underestimation of the Pacific tuna catch. For years tuna have disappeared unreported on motherships like this. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission - which is supposed to protect tuna from overfishing - is clearly failing to do so. The only hope for Pacific tuna fisheries is to close the pockets of international waters as marine reserves and to ban all transfer of fish at sea," said Toribau.

Greenpeace activists later boarded the mothership with the permission of the ship's Captain and found predominantly juvenile yellowfin and skipjack tuna in the hold. The Captain said he had done six other transfers of tuna totalling 675 tonnes over the last month in the same pocket of international waters.

"Scientists have been warning for years that bigeye and yellowfin tuna are suffering from overfishing. When you consider that these secret catches haven’t been included in the assessment, bigeye and yellowfin tuna are probably in much worse trouble than scientists predicted," continued Toribau. "We need to act now and cut the fishing effort by half within the waters of Pacific island countries to save these fisheries."

The Greenpeace ship, the Esperanza, is in the Pacific for the fifth week to defend the pockets of international waters between Pacific Island countries as marine reserves (1).

In the last month Greenpeace has taken action against overfishing by Korean, Taiwanese and US boats, confiscated a fish aggregation device that intensifies overfishing and freed marine life from the hooks of a long-liner.

Greenpeace advocates the creation of a network of marine reserves, protecting 40 per cent of the world's oceans, as the long term solution to overfishing and the recovery of our overexploited oceans.