Fishing about and about fishing

M. Ben-Yami Column   WORLD FISHING, Dec.2013/Jan.2014

 

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE BLUE DEEP SEA

 

Over a year ago, the European Commission proposed to constrict its deep-sea fishery, by phasing out and banning such deep-sea fishing gear, as bottom trawls and bottom-set gillnets. This has been only one attempt at kicking the bottom fishing industry off the world's oceans. The world fisheries have been accused, some rightly, often wrongly, of destroying bottom habitats and damaging priceless coral reefs, of overfishing, bulldozering the sea bed, upsetting the ecosystem, and what not. This trend has led to closing major areas to fishing for reasons or pretexts of environmental protection.

 

For example, recently, one Ben Entickna who led a weeklong (hear, hear!!!)  survey sponsored by the NGO Oceana off the Oregon Coast, reported sea bottom areas that "looked like they were already tilled up", which he "guessed were areas recently fished by trawlers", while other areas "were rich with sponges, corals and bottomfish", thus making a case against trawlers "whose gear scrapes the ocean floor". Subsequently, in tandem with Oceana, he'll lobby to ban trawling in 12 new areas, totaling 1,300 square miles. In the Atlantic, the European Parliament's Fisheries Committee is dealing with a controversial proposal to phase out bottom trawling for deep sea fish in the north east Atlantic. According to industry speakers, the whole proposal is based on wrong stock assessment. In my opinion, also on the

"bulldozering" syndrome. 

 

Enter mining the sea bed. But now it seems that both, fisheries and marine 

environment, are going to be affected by another trend: sea mining. This, in addition

to oil drilling and exploitation, including spills due to shipwrecks and oil rigs disasters

would constrict fisheries even further. For what it is going to do to marine environment

one has only to remember the great spills in Alaska, in the Mexican Gulf, as well as

other environmental disasters (see this Column of Sept. 2010), such as the "minor"

2009 Montara oil spill in the Timor Sea that took 73 days to kill, declined catches

drastically, and sent thousands of fishing people to look for a new livelihood, or the

coastal dredging on Australia's Curtis Island, where sedimentary turbidity caused

massive mortalities of fish and other animals and deterioration of sea grasses.

Simultaneously, over 40 fishermen got sick.

 

Several mining firms plan to prospect for and exploit deep sea mineral resources, some in international waters. Up-to-date technologies, as well as rising price of some of the minerals, boost attractiveness of such initiatives, in spite of previous attempts at deep-sea mining, which haven't yet proven technologically or economically feasible.

 

There's much more than that. Last year, a gigantic amount of rare minerals, estimated by Japanese scientists at 80 to 100 billion mt, were found in the Pacific Ocean. The seabed between Hawaii and Mexico contains nodules of manganese, cobalt, nickel and copper. Also, the bottom of the Red Sea is believed to contain copper, zinc, silver and even some gold. The continual exhaustion of high grade resources onshore has attracted State and private organizations from Europe,  South Africa, Japan, Korea, Russia, Papua New Guinea, and China, who hope that the relatively rich grades from the seabed would justify the higher costs and risks involved. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that the world's seabed resources may exceed by about a thousand times the so far proven rare-mineral reserves onshore. 

Meanwhile, environmental groups have raised concerns about the possible effect of deep-sea mining on aquatic life.  Oversight by national authorities over their waters diminishes with distance. Under-sea miners respond that their likely impact is less than in onshore mining in inhabited areas.

 

Worldwide. A seafloor mining project assumed to be the world's first to mine copper and gold from the deep ocean is run by Canadian company Nautilus Minerals at its site in the Bismark Sea in Papua New Guinea. Nautilus hopes to begin seafloor mining at a second site in the Pacific within four years, for high-grade copper and gold.

 

Off the coast of Namibia, De Beers SA, has been extracting diamonds for decades, while oil companies have been expanding their drilling and pumping to deep waters. Recently, the Namibian Government quite surprisingly banned deep-sea phosphate exploration, intending to precede any controversial marine exploration by independent un-biased Environmental Impact Assessment, accusing the mining companies of not meeting the conditions of their licenses. This, in spite of the hundreds of millions already spent during the last 10 years by the leading investors. Now, the interested companies invited the opposing fishing industry to discuss the way forward. 

Namibia's Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources Bernhard Esau, doesn't want ecological disasters as in the Gulf of Mexico. "In terms of employment – said Essau - phosphate mining is insignificant versus the fishing industry [given] the 13 000 jobs the industry creates compared to 300, mostly foreign, the phosphate mining [is expected to] create".

 

Oceana Forum announced its opposition to the prospecting with seismic airguns for oil and gas beneath the sea bottom from the Delaware bay to Florida’s Cape Canaveral, in area twice the size of California, the U.S. Department of the Interior is considering to allow. The blasting of compressed air at a strength of 250 decibels, claimed to be 100,000 times more intense than a jet engine, may last for weeks, at every 10 seconds, 24 hours a day. These sound blasts reflected by the different layers, needed to produce a picture of the underground rock formation, could endanger marine mammals and bottom-dwelling fish, and affect tourism and the associated employment.. 

 

The bottom fisheries, worldwide, are being attacked on 2 fronts: by NGOs and governmental managers who misrepresent the effect of trawling, ignoring the fact that it must modify the bottom habitat, like farming that supplants forests or prairies on land. On the other hand the already existing and expanding sea-mining operations endanger the industry by direct and secondary killing of marine-life, and closing large areas to bottom fishing. Come what may, as long as people eat fish, trawling survives.