Fishing about and about fishing
WHEN DAVIDS DIE AND GOLIATHS REJOICE
Fishermen’s lives go cheap in more than one way. Apart from engaging in one of the most hazardous occupations worldwide, they are frequently outside the reach of the occupational safety and health services available to other working people. They must navigate, often in shaky vessels, under hazardous weather conditions, and fish while facing the unpredictability of finding and taking their catches, and here and there also pirates and other hostilities. Moreover, some fishery management measures and economic factors create incentive to take risks.
The hazards to which fishermen are exposed arise, apart from the erratic rages of the sea, from the fatiguing nature of catching and processing fish and often grueling working and living conditions. People who’re tired, insufficiently nourished, living in crowded accommodations and lacking proper sanitary support, don’t need dramatic accidents to become ill. Quite recently the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted a long needed Work in Fishing Convention 2007 that addresses minimum requirements for living and working conditions on board fishing vessels and social security.
But there’re also other dangers, less known and talked about. In Israel,
epidemics of cancer among marine commandos, who exercised in the heavily polluted Kishon River estuary, and corrosion damage to boats and mooring installations of Kishon fishing harbour, had awakened public attention to the extent and effects of pollution. Six years ago, a group of fishermen, fishermen’s widows and orphans filled a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit accusing industrial and municipal polluters of causing a cancer epidemic among fishermen and other workers of Kishon Fishing Harbour.
The defenders are 6 major petro-chemical and chemical plants, among them the mammoth Haifa Refineries, a huge fertilizers maker Haifa Chemicals Ltd., and a municipal effluent purification plant, for knowingly polluting the Kishon River, making it biologically dead. Haifa Chemicals alone has been releasing to Kishon 14 mt/day of dense acid liquid, rich in suspended heavy metals. The annual contribution of heavy metals by this plant alone has been: chrome - 10 mt; copper – 2.6 mt; cadmium – 2.3 mt; nickel 8.4 mt; zinc – 54 mt, and smaller amounts of lead, arsenic, and mercury.
The lawsuit names also some government agencies for neglecting enforcement of anti-pollution laws and regulations and neglecting to warn the fishermen and other workers in the Kishon Fishing Harbour of the risk of exposure to its waters and fumes. Since 2001 the number of the cancer affected fishermen has increased to 45 half of them already dead. Among the plaintiffs are 4 dredge and barge operators, employed every couple of years to remove sludge from the harbour and its entrance, working under severe exposure to the heavily polluted sediment. They were never warned. Today, however, 3 of them already are dead of cancer, while the last one is ill with it.
At the same time there’s been hardly any cancer-associated mortality among fishermen in the other Israel’s harbours, Ashdod, Yaffo, and Acre, while almost every single Kishon fisherman who died during the last 25 years or so had died of cancer, although on the average only about a third of deaths among the general population are cancer-related.
While, this painful report from Israel carries a strictly local character, it should serve as a warning also elsewhere to fisherfolk and other people working in polluted harbours, rivers, and estuaries, worldwide. Better start looking at the incidence of cancer before it’s too late.
The Kishon River is still the most polluted stream in Israel and used to be one of the most polluted in the world, while the man-made Kishon fishing harbour is a trap for the pollutants. Some 30,000-75,000 cu.m of the industrial and municipal effluents, containing an array of highly concentrated carcinogenous heavy metals and organic compounds, some volatile, have been flowing daily into the lower Kishon during the two-and-a-half decades since the mid 1970s. The plaintiffs have been for many years exposed to the various carcinogens abounding in the harbour’s extremely acidic waters, vapours and sediment, separately and their mixture, which most probably has created more than one noxious synergetic effect.
The fact that Kishon has been for decades heavily polluted was well known, first, to the polluters themselves, then to the laboratories who performed occasional studies, to the Water Commissioner’s office whose legal duty was to deny water supply to polluting industries, to the Ministries of Health and of Environment, to municipal and inter-municipal bodies, as well as green organizations. None of the above, however, had warned the Kishon Harbour fishermen of the risks involved with their working place. They were concerned about the aquatic life, the loss of the river’s aesthetic values, and the danger of having fish polluted and thus unfit for human consumption. Fishermen’s health and safety problems have been hardly getting any public attention. “Sometimes I wish we were dolphins - said one fisherman - at least we would be getting plenty of publicity and sympathy”.
This is a David against Goliath type of struggle with unpredictable outcome. The fishermen‘s 2 volunteering lawyers are facing some 40 lawyers from the biggest and most expensive law offices in the country, who excel in deliberately prolonging the court’s proceedings. The court case has been dragging already for 6 years, and at the rate of its present progress, it may go on for another 6. Another problem are the numerous experts the defendants hired to prove that there was no pollution, and if there was it was not concentrated enough, and if yes, it was not of the sort that would cause the types of cancer the fishermen were ill with, and if it did, there was no statistical significance, etc., etc. The defense and also the judge seem to have all the time in the world.
So far, the critical mass of the dozens of the feet dragging barristers and their many hired experts seems to affect the court’s intermediate ruling, and only the future can tell the outcome. In the meantime, fishermen keep dying.