- 5 months ago
How new technologies in the fishing industry are putting the world's fisheries into a dangerous state of decline.
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00:01Frontline is a presentation of the Documentary Consortium.
00:07Tonight, are the world's oceans running out of fish?
00:11We used to average 18,000 tons a season.
00:14Last year, we were down to 1,700 tons.
00:17To blame are commercial fishing's big nets and high tech.
00:21They're exhausting fish stocks
00:23and killing millions of other sea animals in the process.
00:26Large whales, small whales, sea turtles and sea lions and things of that nature.
00:32Frontline correspondent Al Austin follows the fleets of the high seas
00:36from Taiwan to Europe and New Zealand to New Bedford
00:39to investigate the source of this crisis.
00:42Any boat can come along and obtain a license and go fishing.
00:45What it's done is created a monster.
00:47We basically mine these living resources
00:50when we should be managing them for long-term sustainable development.
00:54It's a doomsday situation if we keep on the way we're going.
00:57Tonight on Frontline,
01:00To The Last Fish.
01:07With funding provided by the financial support of viewers like you.
01:13And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
01:17This is Frontline.
01:20This is a story about fishing.
01:34A revolution in fishing.
01:37Fishing gone haywire.
01:40It's about the seas running out of fish.
01:47Here's as good a place as any to start the story.
01:59The coast of New Zealand.
02:01This is where a fishing war was fought.
02:04My credentials for doing the story are that I have never caught a fish.
02:18And I get seasick.
02:22I was starting from scratch.
02:29How do you find the fish?
02:32Oh, a lot of instinct.
02:34A lot of experience.
02:36Mainly by science.
02:37Brian Pinar has caught a lot of fish.
02:40And makes a good living at it.
02:45He has a little 40-foot boat and a crew of one.
02:48And he hauls in the tuna, one fish at a time, with a hook and a line.
02:52Hundreds of New Zealanders make their living this way.
02:56That's probably one of the best signs, most of life.
02:58It's very old-fashioned, I know.
03:00Yes, it is old-fashioned.
03:03Stone Age men fish this way.
03:05And you just...
03:06You're away from the rest of the world then.
03:08Well, you know, you wouldn't call the king your uncle,
03:10because it's just that feeling of independence.
03:12You rely on nobody with your own ability, your own...
03:15Pinar likes the independence and solitude of fishing.
03:19But he is not exactly alone out here.
03:22Sitting about 50 miles out, looking like factories,
03:27are what fishing has become.
03:29They are Japanese squid jiggers.
03:32These are factories with crews of 80,
03:35pulling in great quantities of squid
03:37and processing them on the spot.
03:39I don't think we'll be here long by the look of the weather, Jimmy.
03:42They make Brian Pinar uneasy.
03:44But it's only squid.
03:46They don't bother the precious tuna.
03:48Nobody in New Zealand knew about a much greater threat farther out at sea.
03:56Until one day in 1988.
03:59There was a distress call.
04:04A large Japanese fishing boat had caught fire.
04:07Rescuers spotted 22 other boats nearby.
04:11Twelve days later, another call for help.
04:17A Taiwanese vessel was sinking.
04:19Again, other fishing boats were all around.
04:22But none came to the stricken boat's aid.
04:24Evidently, they were so determined to keep their fishing fleet from being discovered,
04:29they were willing to let one boat sink.
04:31Its crew was lost.
04:33The discovery of these fishing boats was frightening news to New Zealand.
04:38Scientists say the foreign fleet could easily wipe out our share of tuna inside two years.
04:44And it's making New Zealand fishermen angry.
04:46They've had enough jobs near making a living with the restrictions that the government's put on us.
04:51I don't think the government should lay other foreign drift needles in.
04:55Meanwhile, tuna fishermen are left wondering if this year's bumper catch may be the last.
04:59Chris Bishop for the network news.
05:06This is what New Zealanders were afraid of.
05:09It's a drift net.
05:13It unreels from the back of a boat.
05:19Floats hold one edge at the surface, while lead weights pull the other edge to a depth of 30 or 40 feet.
05:26The nets hang in the water, waiting to snag the gills or fins of passing fish.
05:35Gill nets have been used for a thousand years or more.
05:38But early drift nets were no more like these than a picket fence is like the China Wall.
05:45The cord is synthetic, cheap and so lightweight a single boat may carry 30 miles of it.
06:04A hydraulic winch reels the net in.
06:07Tons of fish are harvested and back out it goes.
06:11Nothing used before has taken so many fish so easily and so cheaply.
06:16Through the early 1980s, a United Nations agency was encouraging fishermen to use drift nets as an answer to world hunger.
06:26The Japanese were first to carry the idea to extremes, putting huge nets on boats that could hold 500 tons of fish.
06:36They were too successful.
06:38Their own government chased them from Japanese waters.
06:41They headed for the high seas and were joined there by other big drift net vessels from Taiwan and Korea.
06:47In the North Pacific, they began to harvest an immense concentration of flying squid, a delicacy in some countries.
06:59Squid the size of a man's forearm.
07:04Some went into the Bering Sea and began catching salmon illegally.
07:09The salmon come from American and Soviet streams and return to those same streams to spawn and die.
07:16Only American and Soviet fishermen are supposed to catch them.
07:25In 1983, most of the world got its first look at the drift net boats when the environmental group Greenpeace took its ship into the Bering Sea
07:34and found them catching not just fish but birds, seals, rare turtles, dolphins, whales.
07:44People who might not care if the oceans were fished clean of squid want these animals left alone.
07:55Greenpeace and another environmental group, Earth Trust, took their cameras underwater for a more chilling look at the drift nets in action.
08:03We found dozens of species of animals in the nets, even though the fishermen were only after albacore and bullfish.
08:16Ben Diebel led a Greenpeace expedition that took some of the pictures.
08:20The drift nets are designed to collapse around anything that touches them.
08:24And in that way, they're completely indiscriminate.
08:28Earth Trust produced a videotape accusing the drift net fleets of strip mining the seas.
08:35What you are seeing now is a baby common dolphin that died of suffocation after being entangled in an invisible drift net.
08:42Each year, this scene is repeated tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of times.
08:47In addition, many thousands of seabirds are caught and drowned in these...
08:51Japan responded with a videotape of its own, defending the drift nets and accusing Earth Trust of lying.
08:57Drift nets do not catch every form of sea life in their paths.
09:01They are much more selective than that.
09:04Unfortunately, some otherwise well-meaning environmental organizations mistook propaganda for fact and misguidedly embraced the cause.
09:16By 1988, a fleet of 1,200 drift net vessels was working in the North Pacific, laying out enough net each night to circle the world.
09:33The same United Nations agency that had recommended drift nets now estimated that the high seas nets were killing from 300,000 to 1 million animals a year.
09:43Most of them dolphins and porpoises.
09:48They were also killing something like a million birds a year.
09:51Birds that died for the squid in the nets and became entangled themselves.
09:56Scientists admit they have no accurate figures.
10:00Only the fishermen can see what most of the nets are bringing up.
10:04We saw giant ocean sunfish entangled in the nets.
10:09Massive fish, weighed perhaps over a ton, over a hundred years old, more than likely, bigger than the divers we were sending down to photograph them.
10:20Greenpeace says hundreds of these majestic fish were dying in the drift nets.
10:24They didn't immediately suffocate when they hit the nets, and we were able in a couple instances to cut them free and send them on their way.
10:33Environmental groups have hounded the drift netters at sea.
10:47This Greenpeace crew stole three miles of drift net from a Japanese boat in the North Pacific.
11:02The vessel that it belonged to just steamed over the horizon laying the rest of its net as we spent four hours pulling the three-mile section out of the water.
11:12And probably didn't realize until the next morning that we had left the area with the net.
11:17They carried their prize to Washington and laid it out on the Capitol lawn.
11:27One-tenth of one boat's net.
11:31Another group named Sea Shepherds took more drastic action.
11:43They rammed two drift net vessels at sea, hoping to disable the hydraulic winch systems that operate the nets.
11:49A fisherman responded by throwing a club at the Sea Shepherd crew.
12:17Then he went for a knife.
12:24I got it.
12:27Oh boy, we took out that machinery.
12:32Woo, this is a knife.
12:37In 1984, some of the drift net boats began quietly steaming south, chasing the migrating tuna,
12:44into the Tasman Sea and the South Pacific around New Zealand.
12:49They had been there four years before the burning ship gave them away.
12:54By that time, there were almost 200 of them spreading thousands of miles of drift net in the path of the tuna.
13:00New Zealand sent this research boat out to find the drift net fleet and learn what impact it was having.
13:10You can see the net coming in on the port side.
13:13The chief scientist on the expedition was Talbot Murray.
13:15By fishing around the drift nets, Murray could tell that they were not only catching huge amounts of tuna, but wasting millions more.
13:27Tuna were tearing free or falling from the nets, injured or dead.
13:31Not terribly, badly damaged.
13:35When he fished close to a drift net, Murray says often every fish he examined was damaged by the net.
13:41And broken tail and fins were...
13:45Scientists calculated that the South Sea's drift nets were taking five times what the species could stand.
13:50It seemed to spell ruin for New Zealand's fishing industry.
13:55But I have to say that it is essential that this practice be wiped out.
14:01New Zealand's Prime Minister declared war on the drift netters.
14:05We regard it from an international legal point of view as analogous to piracy.
14:10Piracy, you will recall, became punishable at international law by anybody because it was a crime against all nations.
14:17New Zealand and 21 island nations in the South Pacific banned drift nets from their waters.
14:24And then went to the United Nations, seeking to rid all the seas of large-scale drift nets.
14:30Those who engage in this ecologically irresponsible activity should be in no doubt that the techniques they use are unacceptable wherever they are used.
14:40Drive resolution to large-scale pelagic drift net fishing...
14:44On December 22, 1989, two years after they discovered the drift net fleets in their waters, New Zealand and the Little Island nations won a great victory.
14:56A UN resolution.
14:58It is so decided.
14:59The drift net boats must leave the South Pacific.
15:03And they must leave the high seas everywhere by June 1992.
15:08On paper, the drift net's days were numbered.
15:11But the resolution has no teeth, no enforcement powers.
15:15Japan promised to comply.
15:18But what about Taiwan?
15:20Taiwan is not even a UN member.
15:22If you're looking for the big bandit, it is the Taiwanese fleet.
15:28Former U.S. Senator Clement Tillian is head of an American delegation that deals with fishing rights in the North Pacific.
15:35What you've got is a bandit fleet that their own nation can't control, that delivers...
15:42I had heard a lot of stories about Taiwan's huge drift net fleet.
15:47About their sneaking into the South Seas, lying about what they were catching there.
15:52About how they were stealing American salmon and selling them on the black market.
15:57To the rest of the world, it seemed that the drift net fishermen of Taiwan were simply outlaws.
16:02Kaohsiung Harbor, home port of the Taiwan drift net fleet.
16:13Only a fraction of the fleet is home at any time.
16:18Rusty hoax representing a kind of desperation.
16:23Its economy and its culture fed by fish, Taiwan has all but fished out its own waters, with help from pollution.
16:33Fishermen have had to go farther and farther out, and to catch more and more fish to pay for the voyages.
16:39And to find ways to catch the fish more cheaply.
16:42These boats were the answer.
16:45Masterpieces of economy.
16:47Most of them have had previous lives, and only continue to serve their owners because they are big enough to hold mountains of net and fish.
16:54And tons of fuel.
16:56The crews are economical too.
17:01Each man is paid about $500 a month.
17:04Most of them are recruited in foreign ports, where men will work for that.
17:09The nets themselves are everywhere in Kaohsiung.
17:13On the docks, in the streets, on sidewalks.
17:15Like the boats in the harbor, these nets are only a sample.
17:20Most of the nets are out at sea.
17:22The nets and the boats are owned by some businessmen, who command their fleet from two large buildings that overlook the harbor.
17:29I was surprised when the boat owners agreed to talk at all.
17:45This is nylon.
17:48They have been shy of publicity in the past, but now they seemed eager to talk about their drift nets.
17:54So we have different nets for different species.
17:58And this unit is for sharks, mainly for the bottom, bottom unit.
18:03Okay?
18:05So, how to decide the species, target species?
18:09The owners say the size of the mesh, the holes in the net, determine the size of the fish the nets catch.
18:16And that makes them efficient and dolphin safe.
18:19So, somebody say that the gear net kills every species that is wrong.
18:26Because we decide by the size of the net, smaller than this one will pass through.
18:33Bigger than this one will not yield.
18:36It will go away.
18:37Underwater footage has shown it doesn't work that way.
18:44Even nets with small mesh may wrap around animals or large fish.
18:49And they can't go away.
18:51This is the float.
18:53This is float.
18:55Now, in between the net and float, we have this one.
18:59This one, to avoid, to avoid guilt by a bird or another murmurs.
19:09This goes on the surface?
19:10Yes.
19:12And so the dolphin and the bird can swim?
19:14Yeah.
19:16Every day.
19:17Back in New Zealand, Talbot Murray had talked about this technique, submerging the net to let dolphins swim over it.
19:25Scientists there tested it.
19:26And they found that even when they submerged their nets 15 meters, that they still caught dolphins.
19:35And at the same time, they caught significantly less of the species that they were interested in catching.
19:42Now, we are making, you know, do our best, you know, to improve the net, to avoid catching the another murmurs or torturers.
19:52That is very important.
19:53Anyway, we are doing.
19:54We are doing.
19:55We need time, you know, to improve.
19:56Yeah.
19:57It takes time anyway, but we are doing.
19:58We are proceeding.
19:59The boat owners show us a tape made aboard one of their drift net boats, fishing for squid in the North Pacific last year.
20:14They had edited the tape to about two hours.
20:17It shows mile after mile of drift net being reeled in, with no dolphins, whales, turtles or birds being caught.
20:24Only squid.
20:26Evidence that drift net fishing is clean, selective.
20:30An American observer named Michael Hoke is shown on board.
20:34The U.S. and some other countries have arranged with Taiwan to put observers on a sampling of the boats.
20:39We found Michael Hoke in North Carolina.
20:42You could go for a real long time and not see much of anything but squid and miscellaneous fish that are not endangered.
20:50Then all of a sudden, here's Moby Dick in the net, you know.
20:53The rules of the observer program won't allow Hoke to say how many birds or animals he saw, but he thinks every net had something and sometimes very rare creatures.
21:04Large whales, small whales, sea turtles, sea birds, pinnipeds and sea lions and things of that nature.
21:12There were South African crew members aboard one of the vessels and they expressed a great concern for birds flopping around on the deck with broken wings.
21:25And, you know, they just said, look, we're just out here trying to make a living and don't hate us for this.
21:30Hoke says he saw a few salmon caught, but it didn't seem to be intentional.
21:39Some drift net boats have been found in illegal areas catching American salmon.
21:43The Coast Guard came upon a Taiwanese vessel in the fog in the far North Pacific about.
21:54Wayne Lewis is a special agent for the National Marine Fisheries Service in Seattle.
21:59We had one of our agents in the helicopter who was taking video.
22:02The camera caught the fishermen throwing their catch of salmon overboard as fast as they could.
22:11Then the captain let the American agents on board.
22:15But he admitted that he in fact had been out there fishing for salmon and he offered the boarding party gold and money and sex if they would forget what was going on.
22:33Some of the criticism against the Taiwan drift net fleet in the North Pacific.
22:38I asked James Tsai about this, about Taiwanese drift net boats straying out of the squid zone to catch salmon.
22:45Mr. Tsai is president of four fishing companies and executive director of an association of boat owners.
22:54Mr. Tsai said there is no evidence that fishing boats have been doing that.
23:02You know, I don't know how to respond to that.
23:04How anybody could say that the Taiwanese are not involved in this and haven't been doing it, you know, escapes common sense and reason.
23:17But what about the moratorium?
23:20The UN resolution that drift net fishing should stop everywhere next year.
23:26I asked the spokesman for Taiwan's Agriculture Council, which regulates fishing, about that.
23:31Surely my government will comply with those principles.
23:35That sounds like a promise to enforce the moratorium.
23:39But it isn't quite.
23:41Taiwan's government avoids making that promise directly.
23:44The Agriculture Council spokesman does say the drift nets will be phased out.
23:48As I just mentioned, my government has already stopped the licensing on drift net fishing.
23:54That's already stopped.
23:55It's simply impossible for us to delimit all the operation of drift net fishing.
24:02It's impossible.
24:04Taiwan University law professor Quen Chan Fu says it doesn't matter what the Agriculture Council says.
24:10Taiwan's people and its legislature will not allow drift netting to stop.
24:14The policy could not be fulfilled. I don't think so.
24:17We will do everything we can to stop that kind of wrong policy.
24:24Professor Fu may be right.
24:27The investment in the drift net fleet is so great that even if Taiwan's government tries to rein it in, it may fail.
24:35There's too much money involved.
24:37The boat owners hope to convince the world that the drift nets are safe after all.
24:41Failing that, they make it clear that an end to drift netting must be on their own schedule.
24:47It must take a long time. Maybe five years, ten years.
24:51That's going to be a big problem.
24:53Ecologist Junyi Lin is Taiwan's most outspoken critic of drift net fishing.
24:59He too believes the owners will not be stopped.
25:02That their investment almost compels them to continue.
25:05And this, of course, has a so-called vicious cycle.
25:08You know, the greater investment, the greater the investment in their new technology, the greater catch they have to make it.
25:17You know.
25:18And the faster they deplete the ocean.
25:20The faster they deplete the ocean, yes.
25:22And drift net is such a, so kind of reckless, suicidal approach to catch the fish.
25:31You know, that I think would deplete the ocean resources in no time.
25:36I think this one, this one, and this one.
25:39Consumers may be doing what governments have failed to do.
25:42The biggest market for tuna caught by drift nets used to be America.
25:46But pictures of dead dolphins started an American boycott of tuna.
25:50And American canneries quit buying tuna caught in drift nets.
25:54The boat owners say it's unfair.
25:56Second fact is that the United States, America, see, there's no guillard net prohibited.
26:02So no more market.
26:04Usually we sell, we sell this fish to Thailand.
26:08To United States, then can start his bamboo.
26:12Now they deject to buy the fish from the guillard net.
26:17So all fish coming in return to Taiwan.
26:18Oh, so it lowers the price.
26:20Yeah, yeah, yeah.
26:21Oh.
26:23So now, most fishermen, the crew, now going around the market without jump.
26:30All market in the world dejected by the tuna from the guillard net.
26:39Don't you have any markets left?
26:41Very small.
26:42But the catch of tuna by Taiwan's drift nets is anything but small.
26:51How much fish would this transport ship hold?
26:561,100 tons?
26:58Yes, 1,100 tons.
27:001,100 tons?
27:01Yes.
27:031,100 tons.
27:07There are still companies willing to buy these tuna.
27:09And new markets may be opening.
27:12Perhaps, ironically, mainland China.
27:14The tuna from this one Taiwanese transport vessel is two-thirds the amount of Pacific albacore tuna caught in a full year by all American fishermen.
27:23Across the Pacific from Kaohsiung Harbor in Newport, Oregon, fishermen like Herb Goebbler were warning that the drift nets are having a disastrous effect on American tuna fishing.
27:44They've been hammering albacore since about 1980.
27:48And we've watched our catch steadily decline from the same time to now.
27:53We used to average, the American domestic albacore fleet, Oregon, Washington, California, used to average 18,000 tons a season.
28:03Last year, we were down to 1,700 tons.
28:051,750 tons was our catch last year.
28:07From Washington to California, fishermen talk of a lot of other problems besides drift nets.
28:15The rising cost of catching dwindling numbers of fish amid government regulations they consider anti-fishermen.
28:22Some are giving up or heading for Latin America where it's okay to catch a few dolphins or sea lions by accident.
28:28At San Pedro Harbor in Los Angeles, Nick Vitalich says he's ready to give up.
28:37Why don't they let us work in the ocean the way we used to be?
28:42Ten years ago, five years ago, even 20 years ago, it was beautiful.
28:47It happened as, you know, to tell you the truth, you can step from one boat to another all the way across.
28:54That's how many boats we were here, 180 boats.
29:00Maybe too many boats, here at San Pedro and everywhere else.
29:08The government lists over 100 species of fish as overfished and calls the condition of American fishery sources deplorable.
29:16Worse than 14 years ago.
29:20That's when the U.S. made foreign fishing boats leave American waters.
29:25Americans soon filled the vacuum.
29:29And when the competition got keener, they did what Taiwan had done.
29:33They looked for new ways to catch the fish.
29:35Poisonous fish.
29:36It's a what?
29:37Poisonous fish.
29:39Poisonous.
29:40This is a color fathometer that just marks feed.
29:44Because what we're targeting on is an animal that's a very opportunistic predator.
29:51So we know where there's feed.
29:53Tony West has a 60-foot boat and catches swordfish with a miniature version of the driftnet.
29:58And this is a long-range radar up to 48 miles and this is a short range up to 24 miles.
30:05It sounds like the same vicious cycle the ecologist in Taiwan, Mr. Lin, had talked about.
30:11You need a couple of different fathometers also.
30:15The fish become scarcer.
30:17The fishermen invest more money in technology to catch them.
30:20They have to catch more fish to pay for it.
30:22And the fish get scarcer.
30:23So you need backups.
30:25And then our major communications line is all of these radios all over here.
30:30We do use as much modern technology as we can.
30:34Part of it's an ego trip and part of it's keeping up with the Joneses, you know.
30:38You and I are fishermen and we're in competition with each other at the marketplace.
30:43And if you bring more than I do, then it's not so much my ego, but it's the standpoint that the price is going to go down.
30:48So I have to keep up with your production.
30:49So if you get some new XYZ machine that's going to do this for you, by gosh, I better get the same thing.
30:57So you get caught up into that syndrome.
30:59Now, if we threw away all of that and went back to the ground.
31:03I got to see the technology at work one night.
31:06The moon is covered up.
31:08You see the moon, fish come up.
31:10Gasparri Guarassi is looking for mackerel.
31:14Or anything else he can catch.
31:16Squid, bonita, anything except sardines.
31:19The government won't let him have sardines.
31:22Even though the San Pedro fishermen agree, sardines are so plentiful they're hard to avoid.
31:27If he catches any, he'll have to throw them away.
31:29Like all the others, Mr. Guarassi's boat has two of everything.
31:37Radar, temperature gauges, sonar, depth finders.
31:42In daylight, he sometimes even hires a spotter plane and pays the pilot 5% of his catch.
31:47Mr. Guarassi is an immigrant from Italy.
32:00There was a time when his whole crew spoke Italian.
32:07Now they speak Spanish.
32:09Most are from El Salvador.
32:11California's fishing boats run on migrant labor, just like California's farms.
32:15And like Taiwan's fishing boats.
32:19The crew has paid a percentage of the catch.
32:22They say they've caught very little lately.
32:24Tonight, none of his gadgets can find Mr. Guarassi any mackerel.
32:30He has the crew deploy the net anyway, to clean it.
32:38The net cost him $70,000.
32:40It works by a system of cables and pulleys and booms and winches that clang and whirr and crash about as the men work through the night on a slick heaving deck.
32:57They've made no money on the trip, because there are no fish.
33:02Mr. Guarassi has lost money.
33:04Did you have a good season?
33:05Not really.
33:06We all struggle.
33:07San Pedro Harbor is full of angry men like Sal Russo, frustrated by how hard it is to make a living fishing, but blaming it on government regulations.
33:24Nobody even knows.
33:25Nobody knows.
33:26Nobody knows.
33:27We have a season.
33:29That's a shame.
33:32I think a bird, a dog, anything, is more valuable than a human life if you've got to work to live like a jackass like us.
33:43That's a shame.
33:44Six thousand miles away, in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of France, lies a little island named Lille-Dieu.
34:01It's an island of fishermen.
34:04Always has been.
34:10Now it's also a fresh battlefield in the fishing revolution.
34:16136 boats harbor here.
34:19The fishermen of those boats catch more fish than all other French fishermen combined.
34:23Lille-Dieu is so proud of its fishing tradition that shops on the island sell a videotape about it.
34:37The historical footage shows tuna being caught with hooks and lines.
34:42But they couldn't catch enough fish this way to keep up with France's rising cost of living.
34:47Fishing, and the island itself, began to die.
34:49Like Taiwan, Lille-Dieu was rescued by the discovery of drift nets.
34:58Now all the fishermen of the island have put away their hooks and lines,
35:02and have equipped their boats with drift nets.
35:09Christian Ruffin is 28 years old.
35:12He owns this boat and has a crew of seven.
35:15The boat cost over a million dollars.
35:17The fishermen's cooperative lent him most of the money for it.
35:21It uses drift nets four miles long to catch tuna, bass, and swordfish.
35:26This is a very successful young man.
35:27This is a very successful young man.
35:30He has been owning his own boat for one year, and it works, and he's really pleased with what he's doing.
35:35Yes, yes, yes.
35:36Now it's very good with the drift nets.
35:37Italy also turned to drift nets, laying them out in the Mediterranean Sea to catch swordfish.
35:38The European nets are much smaller than those of Taiwan and Japan.
35:41But even so, these nets were killing so many more animals.
35:42Which means they have been selling them in the Mediterranean Sea.
35:43But it's not for me.
35:44Yes.
35:45I mean, it's all been off of a boat for a year, and it's all been on the land of the boat.
35:46It's all been off of a boat for a year, and it works.
35:47It's all been on the boat for one year, and it works, and he's really pleased with what
35:48it's doing.
35:49Yes, yes, yes, now it's all been on the boat for one year.
35:50It's all been on the boat for one year.
35:51Italy also turned to driftnets, laying them out in the Mediterranean Sea to catch swordfish.
36:03The European nets are much smaller than those of Taiwan and Japan.
36:08But even so, these nets were killing so many whales and dolphins that Italy ordered its fishermen to quit using them.
36:15Dead mammals are only part of Europe's fishing problems, and driftnets only part of the cause.
36:22Scientists say that in the waters surrounding Europe, almost every species of fish is being depleted, overfished by as much as 400%.
36:31Xavier Prats is a spokesman for the European Commission.
36:36The present stocks of haddock in the North Sea are 12%, 12% what they were in 1970.
36:43So in 20 years, we've squandered 90% of our resources.
36:49The Commission considered it a crisis.
36:52Its ministers met in Brussels just before last Christmas to impose new regulations for all European fishermen.
36:59High on the agenda was the driftnet.
37:01Every country was prepared for a ban.
37:04Every country except France.
37:06Yes, but that's not a fish.
37:09That's not a fish, honey.
37:10Helene Bohr of Greenpeace contends the French driftnets pose the same threat as the Great Asian nets.
37:17At the moment, the only difference is you have longer nets, or you had longer nets in the South Pacific, but I don't think the difference is that great.
37:28And you had hundreds of boats in the Mediterranean and a growing fleet in the Atlantic, and if it's not stopped, it's going to be more than comparable, and it might be too late.
37:39Back on the island of Lille-Dieu, Greenpeace is a dirty word, and the European Council not much better.
37:53If driftnet fishing in Lille-Dieu is banned, then the whole fishing business will collapse, tumble down.
37:59If driftnets are banned, Christian Raffin says, he and his family would be ruined, and in the long run, so would the rest of the island.
38:10Raffin rips apart his own nets, hoping to show they won't harm dolphins.
38:15A dolphin can break it, see?
38:18Raffin says he doesn't want to think about whether his two young sons will follow in his footsteps and be fishermen.
38:24It's too sad to think about.
38:26If the past allows us to bother us, to prevent us from working, I think that fishermen will start to be violent.
38:44And there was violence of sorts by French fishermen.
38:47They dumped 15 tons of over-ripe sardines in a Brussels street outside the European Commission headquarters
38:59to protest the imminent driftnet ban.
39:04Two days later, the ministers adjourned, announcing new regulations, but no driftnet ban.
39:11They said they would try again this summer.
39:13For a moment, the fishermen of L'Ile-Dieu had won.
39:27Across the Atlantic, in American waters, driftnets have little or nothing to do with what's happened.
39:33But the fish are disappearing just the same.
39:35The fishermen have found other ways to catch too much.
39:46New Bedford, Massachusetts, is probably America's most important fishing port.
39:52Certainly its most famous.
39:55Herman Melville had Captain Ahab sail from here to find Moby Dick.
39:58Once they had killed too many of the whales, the New Bedford seamen began to concentrate on fish.
40:14Old fishermen can remember pulling fish from the Atlantic in such numbers.
40:18The boats were in danger of swamping.
40:20The fishermen still go out from New Bedford.
40:24They still bring in fish.
40:26But it is not the same.
40:30We're just barely making it.
40:32Calvin Saunders is in with a load of cod.
40:38About 10,000 pounds for a week of fishing.
40:43About $9,000 worth.
40:45The three crew members will get about $1,000 a piece.
40:50The fuel costs $2,500.
40:52The ice, $1,000.
40:55Then there's food, maintenance, the mortgage on the boat to pay.
40:58Some weeks we've done better.
41:00To do better, they fish harder.
41:03Compared with the good days, twice the effort for half the fish.
41:07It's scary.
41:08It's really scary.
41:09It's a doomsday situation if we keep on the way we're going.
41:13Fish disappearing.
41:14Fish disappearing.
41:15But the ground's getting to work so hard that they'll never come back.
41:19So this is a crisis.
41:20Of course it is.
41:21Sure it's a crisis.
41:22Sure it's a crisis.
41:22Other than that, we wouldn't be.
41:23Why shouldn't we be trying to reap it off?
41:25I still own the opportunity.
41:27These three men sound more like environmentalists than fishermen.
41:30But they've spent most of their lives fishing.
41:32And say fishermen are conservationists.
41:35They left the sea in order to organize New Bedford fishermen and boat owners.
41:39And try to get the government to save the fishing industry from itself.
41:42They want catch limits and limits on the number of boats.
41:46And they want those boats to stay in port at least ten days a month.
41:49The way it is right now, any boat can come along and obtain a license and go fishing.
41:55And what it's done is it's created a monster.
41:57It's created overfishing.
41:59With modern technology like the latest in electronics, the bigger horsepower on boats, bigger towing, bigger gear, bigger nets, bigger scallop dredges.
42:10It's taken its toll on the fishery.
42:13If we don't get a management system or conservation method in better than what we have right now,
42:20that we don't feel there'll be any resource to manage in the very near future.
42:23Because some boats are making back-to-back trips.
42:27They come in in the morning, they've been out for 10 or 12 days or 12 or 14 days.
42:31They come in, they offload, another crew jumps aboard and goes right out.
42:36Here in New Bedford Harbor is an example of the problem the three men are talking about.
42:41It's a scallop boat, partly owned by Jams Isaacson.
42:43What do you use, what does your boat usually stay in port for?
42:48This one here, this boat here now don't stay in the toll.
42:53It comes in this morning, it's going out in a half an hour.
42:58But the crew is new.
43:00So you have two crews?
43:01Two crews.
43:05We have two boats with three crews.
43:08You want to go inside?
43:10Yeah.
43:11Mr. Isaacson says his boat, the diligence, cost a million dollars.
43:17It has four engines.
43:19They burn 10,000 gallons of fuel in two weeks at sea.
43:24That's the dolly in there.
43:26The boat carries a crew of nine comfortably.
43:28They have television, showers, good food.
43:31To pay for itself, the boat has to bring in a million dollars worth of scallops a year, Isaacson says.
43:37One lead.
43:38Do you think you could pay the mortgage on a boat like this if you were only allowed out for eight days and then had to stay in port for five?
43:47You couldn't make it at that rate, huh?
43:51Couldn't make it at that point.
43:54Isaacson says he has to get 10,000 pounds of scallops every time out to break even.
43:59He averages 15,000 pounds, then goes right back out.
44:03So it's still possible to make a profit, even as the fish disappear.
44:07See, you just got to take the effort off the resource.
44:09There's no way that this can sustain the pounding of this taking.
44:12There's no way.
44:13So is greed the problem, and is the fishermen to blame?
44:16You say, because there's overfishing, the public feels the fishermen is to blame.
44:21Who, hell, has allowed the overfishing?
44:25The government has allowed this overfishing to go on and on and on.
44:29We've tried for the last three or four years, almost four years now, we've tried to get a different management system.
44:34And now we're talking to deaf ears.
44:36We feel we're talking to deaf ears because we go to meetings, we've been all over.
44:41This is the office that's supposed to manage America's marine resources, the National Marine Fisheries Service.
44:48It's a branch of the Commerce Department.
44:50No one seems to think the agency has done a good job.
44:53The agency has left the field in many areas because of its being economically devastated over the last ten years by the Reagan and Bush administrations, even this year.
45:09Roger McManus is president of the Center for Marine Conservation, an environmental organization which has sued the Fisheries Service to force it to do its job.
45:17The problems with the American Fisheries Management are not mysteries.
45:23They're not new revelations.
45:24There's been report after study after report done, all pointing to the same problems.
45:31About a year ago, the Marine Fisheries Agency got this report card, a study commonly called the Chandler Report.
45:39It describes an ineffective agency with too much to do and not nearly enough money to do it.
45:44Its agents spread much too thin to enforce regulations.
45:50Those regulations, the report says, are often based on pressure from fishermen rather than the needs of conservation.
45:57Fishermen are allowed to continue taking some of the most seriously depleted fish.
46:01We have fundamentally the capacity to wipe out stocks of fish.
46:08And we're demonstrating that we can do that over and over again.
46:13We basically mine these living resources when we should be managing them for long-term sustainable development.
46:21One of the surprising criticisms of the Marine Fisheries Agency contained in the Chandler Report is that despite being underfunded,
46:29the agency keeps asking for less money than Congress wants to give it.
46:33I fully endorse virtually everything that's in the Chandler Report.
46:37I think it's excellent.
46:38That amounts to a confession, because William Fox is the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service.
46:44He got the job last year after being one of the agency's severest critics.
46:48And a new follow-up study says Fox is improving the agency.
46:52I don't think there's any one bad guy that you can point to.
46:55The system is very complex, and the system has failed.
47:01Fox says a key to conserving fish is to set quotas for how many fish can be caught.
47:06But the government should not over-regulate how the fishermen can catch them.
47:10We need to turn that around and say that this is the quantity of fish that can be taken.
47:19And then to allocate those harvest rights so that individuals can make a rational decision
47:26about how much capital investment they put in in order to take that.
47:30He predicts the fish will make a comeback, but not soon, because many species are in very bad shape.
47:36Well, you're talking five years, ten years, even 20 years in order to get recovered.
47:41We've got to be willing to lead on this.
47:43We are really woefully lacking, I think, in the northeast groundfish industry of some reliable numbers, numbers that...
47:52This March, hundreds of fishermen met in Maine and asked Mr. Fox to come talk to them about his plans.
47:57It's important research, again, to get us out of the mode of simply being able to hindcast and get us into the mode of...
48:02The reaction of the fishermen was predictable.
48:05Your fellows seem to have a lot of...
48:06I don't know what you call it.
48:08Somebody asks you a question.
48:09Well, I don't really know.
48:11And you base everything you tell us on what you really don't know.
48:16It kind of bothers us fishermen.
48:18Yeah, yeah.
48:19We're going to be told we've got to do all this stuff, but nobody really knows anything.
48:26It doesn't make much sense.
48:28You guys got some jobs, but I don't think we're going to have any if you keep on.
48:33We'll save the fish, but what about the people?
48:36This is something Fox, the fishermen, and environmentalists all agree on.
48:40The government doesn't know enough about oceans and fish to make wise rules.
48:44It's guessing at the toll the fishermen's arms race is taking.
48:48At what it means to kill so many marine animals.
48:51To catch so many tuna and squid and scallops.
48:56Here, at a place called Woods Hole on Cape Cod, Massachusetts,
49:00America's premier marine research vessel, the Albatross 4,
49:04one of the ships built to find the answers, lies idle.
49:08Tied up at dock for the last year and a half.
49:11Ron Smolowitz once commanded her.
49:13You know, this ship basically is the cornerstone of the whole fishery system.
49:19She's laid up right now for a lack of funds.
49:23Is there something telling you about that?
49:25Well, I think so.
49:26Well, while that ship sits here, there's things taking place out in the ocean now that we have no knowledge.
49:32Smolowitz estimates he spent 3,000 days at sea doing exploratory fishing and studying the effects of different kinds of fishing gear.
49:44He believes the revolution in fishing has left man and the sea desperately out of balance.
49:50What we've seen is a growth in the fishing vessels.
49:58In the electronic aids that a fisherman has to help him catch the fish.
50:06The size of his engines, the size of his deck hailing equipment, all have increased.
50:12The predators become more efficient.
50:15That fish is the same fish.
50:16Okay, and it's losing.
50:29It is what's called an innovation treadmill.
50:33And that'll keep on going on until conceivably the last fish is caught.
50:37No matter what port or what country or what sea, the story I found was always the same.
50:48Fishing technology run amok.
50:53Technology and pollution running amok hand in hand, chasing fewer and fewer fish, as the world pleads for more and more.
51:01I found almost no one who was optimistic about a solution.
51:14Is it possible to manage the seas?
51:16Is it possible to make fishermen stop hunting the vanishing game and begin to tend it, conserve it, in time?
51:27In New Bedford, they talk of three years to doomsday.
51:37In Europe, a crisis.
51:39The seas overfished 400%.
51:42Taiwan, its own water is so desolate, Taiwan's boats go halfway around the world in search of fish.
51:54I heard the same warnings everywhere, and the same resistance.
51:58What do you believe is going to happen to the driftnet fleet of Taiwan?
52:13In Taiwan, the spokesman for the driftnet fleet, Mr. Tsai, said he still hopes his government will allow the high seas driftnet fishing to continue.
52:23And what if it doesn't?
52:25What if the government orders an end to it?
52:28He said if the government, the government's policy is according to the wills of the fishermen, they will accept.
52:39But if not, they will divide.
52:48And in France, on the island of Lille-Dieu.
52:52What will you do if they ban driftnet fishing?
52:55They said that, of course, driftnet fishing is their life, so they will fight.
53:07And if Brussels ban driftnet fishing, they will use violent action.
53:14The biggest part of the fishermen are asking the government to do anything better than what we're doing right now, because there's no light at the end of the tunnel.
53:34Absolutely no light.
53:34It's just a, it's a doomsday situation if we keep on the way we're going.
53:39They said that when I started fishing, too.
53:42That's a long time ago.
53:44They said that it's completed.
53:46It's all done.
53:48That's 50 years ago.
53:50But it's still gone.
53:52So you think it'll spring back?
53:54Yeah, it's, of course, in cycles, like fishing, fish and fish will never die.
54:03Fishermen are like everybody else.
54:05We live to, for today, to hell with tomorrow, except some of us.
54:09And that's why the three of us are ashore, because we believe in these kind of things, instead of being out there and taking the last scallop or the last fish.
54:16It's like the rainforests, someone said.
54:25The overfished oceans are like the destruction of the rainforests.
54:31The difference is, you can see what's happening to the rainforests.
54:36It's harder to tell with an ocean.
54:37We've taken and taken from the seas, expecting a never-ending harvest, hoping everything will be all right down there.
54:54Now something has gone wrong, and it's getting very late.
55:07You can see what's happening to the rainforests.
55:37The rainforests.
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