Does this fish taste slavey to you?

 

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina, Knopf 2019

ISBN 0451492943 (ISBN13: 9780451492944)

It's difficult to convey to the average non-sailor the immensity of the seas; once out of sight of land, or "off-soundings" in sailor talk, it's easy to lose one's way, and the farther from traditional shipping lanes one wanders, the lonelier the sea can be. It is also, as Ian Urbina suggests in this troubling survey of oceanic criminality, a great place in which to disguise evil deeds. From renegade dumping of toxic waste, labour practices bordering on slavery, illegal fishing that is robbing the seas bare of critical fish stocks, Urbina has catalogued the lot, as well as the generally weak attempts of land-focused governments to police the seas beyond their territorial borders, and which the author convincingly argues are the greatest example of the tragedy of the commons in human history.

Since arriving in Nova Scotia (we are having our sailboat serviced at a nearby shipyard), my family and I have become more aware of the fishing industry and how much expense, labour and management are required to keep a biological resource, such as lobster, shellfish and wild (as opposed to farmed) fish, viable and renewable in the face of illegal "harvesting" and often challenging, when not appalling, conditions. But even in Canada, a first-world country of great riches, we haven't been able to curtail greed for fish in favour of the survivial of fish.

“This fantasy that it is possible to fish sustainably, legally, and using workers with contracts, making a living wage, and still deliver a five-ounce can of skipjack tuna for $2.50 that ends up on the grocery shelf only days after the fish was pulled from the water thousands of miles away. Prices that low and efficiencies that tight come with hidden costs, and it is the manning agencies that help in the hiding.” -Ian Urbina, The Outlaw Ocean

But Canada has the resources to control, insofar as it is willing to defend its oceanic borders and possesses the wealth and will to do so; as Urbina points out, many countries do not have these advantages, and the combination of lax enforcement, corruption at various levels of local and national governance, the ability of larger countries to build more and larger fishing boats, and the wasteful practices of an underregulated international fishing industry, such as the concept of bycatch and the destructive seine-netting and bottom trawling are stripping the once-bountiful oceans bare of life beyond plankton and jellyfish and are collapsing the natural food order worldwide.

Urbina, who writes as an investigative reporter for The New York Times and The Atlantic magazine, is unstinting in his analysis of the appetite for sealife, and for the opportunities the vastness of the oceans offers to criminal behaviour. Illegal fishing using essentially captive crews, who are either tricked into servitude or are effectively indentured, sometimes for years, by debt in populous, poor places such as Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia, is seen by Urbina as endemic and an essential way to deliver, if not for much longer, the animal protein fish represent to the teeming billions of human mouths across the planet, as well as to the plates of far richer gourmets in the developed world, those countries who, like Canada, many have overfished their own waters but are not above looking the other way when a nice cut shows up at the fishmonger's with hazy provenance.

I won't even discuss the ecological horror and deep stupidity of shark finning, save that Urbina argues that a live shark is exponentially worth more alive to a Pacific atoll nation than as a dubious status symbol at a Chinese wedding.

So, not a happy read, but a very informative one that may make the reader question not only what is on her plate, but how it got there and what degree of suffering and short-sightedness was necessary.