Latest news with #MonacoExplorations
France 24
14-05-2025
- General
- France 24
Forced labour, disease and conflict: The hidden side of industrial fishing in Saya de Malha
In October 2022, a British-American couple, Kyle and Maryanne Webb, were sailing their yacht through a remote area of the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Seychelles, just south of the Saya de Malha Bank, the world's largest seagrass field. The Webbs were sailing enthusiasts and had covered tens of thousands of miles on their vessel, the Begonia, over the previous years. As they passed the bank, they spotted a small fishing vessel, about 55 feet in length, painted bright yellow and turquoise, with about a dozen red and orange flags billowing from the roof of its cabin. It was a Sri Lankan gillnet boat called, in Sinhali, the Hasaranga Putha. Looking gaunt and desperate, the crew told the Webbs that they had sailed roughly 2,000 miles from their home port, in Beruwala, Sri Lanka. They had been at sea for two weeks, they said, but had only caught four fish. They begged the Webbs for food, soda and cigarettes. The Webbs gave them what they could, including fresh water, then headed on their way. "They were clearly in a struggling financial position, "Mrs. Webb said. "It broke my heart to see the efforts they feel they must go to provide for their families." A month later, again near the Saya de Malha Bank, the Hasaranga Putha hailed another vessel – the South African ocean research and supply ship, S.A. Agulhas II, who was on an expedition in Saya de Malha for the environmental non-profit Monaco Explorations. By this time, the Sri Lankan crew was almost out of fuel and begged for diesel. The scientists did not have the right type of petrol to offer but they still boarded a dinghy and brought the fishers water and cigarettes. Grateful, the Sri Lankans gave them fish in return. The Hasaranga Putha would remain at sea for another six months before returning to Colombo in April 2023. A perilous journey Hundreds of miles from the nearest port, the Saya de Malha Bank is one of the most remote areas on the planet, which means it can be a harrowing workplace for the thousands of fishers from a half dozen countries that make the perilous journey to reach it. The farther from shore that vessels travel, and the more time they spend at sea, the more the risks pile up. Dangerous storms, deadly accidents, malnutrition, and physical violence are common threats faced by distant-water crews. Each year, a fleet of several dozen Sri Lankan gill-netters makes some of the longest trips made to the area, often in the least equipped boats. Some of the vessels that fish the Saya de Malha Bank engage in a practice called transshipment, where they offload their catch to refrigerated carriers without returning to shore, so that they can remain fishing on the high seas for longer periods of time. Fishing is the most dangerous occupation in the world, and more than 100,000 fishermen die on the job each year. When they do, particularly on longer journeys far from shore, it is not uncommon for their bodies to be buried at sea. Sri Lankan gillnetters are not the only fishing vessels making perilous journeys to reach the rich and biodiverse Saya de Malha Bank. Thai fishmeal trawlers also target these waters, traveling more than 2,500 nautical miles from the port of Kantang. In January 2016, for example, three Thai trawlers left the Saya de Malha Bank and returned to Thailand. During the journey, 38 Cambodian crew members fell ill, and by the time they returned to port, six had already died. The remaining sick crew were hospitalised and treated for beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin B1 or thiamine. Symptoms include tingling, burning, numbness, difficulty breathing, lethargy, chest pain, dizziness, confusion, and severe swelling. Easily preventable, yet fatal if left untreated, beriberi has historically appeared in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps, but it has largely been stamped out. Experts say that when it occurs at sea, beriberi often indicates criminal neglect. One medical examiner described it as "slow-motion murder" because it is so easily treatable and avoidable. The disease has become more prevalent on distant-water fishing vessels in part because ships stay so long at sea, a trend facilitated by transshipment. Working practices involving hard labour and extensive working hours cause the body to deplete vitamin B1 at a faster metabolic rate to produce energy, the Thai government concluded in a report on the deaths. Further research by Greenpeace found that some of the workers were victims of forced labour. Crime on the high seas Today, fewer vessels from the Thai fleet are traveling to Saya de Mahla, but some still make the trip, and questions about their working conditions linger. In April 2023, one of those vessels, the Chokephoemsin 1, a bright blue 90-foot trawler, set out for the Saya de Malha Bank with a crew member named Ae Khunsena, who boarded the ship in Samut Prakan, Thailand, for a five-month tour, according to a report compiled by Stella Maris, a non-profit organisation that helps fishers. As is typical on high-seas vessels, the hours were long and punishing. Khunsena earned 10,000 baht, or about $288, per month, according to his contract. In one of his last calls to his family through Facebook, Khunsena said he had witnessed a fight that resulted in more than one death. He said the body of a crew member who was killed was brought back to the ship and kept in the freezer. When his family pressed for details, Khunsena said he would tell them more later. He added that another Thai crew member who also witnessed the killing had been threatened with death and so he fled the ship while it was still near shore along the Thai coast. Khunsena's family spoke to Khunsena for the last time on July 22, 2023. A company official contested this claim and said no such fight happened and added that there was an observer from the Department of Fisheries aboard the vessel, who would have reported such an incident had it happened. On July 29, while working in waters near Sri Lanka, Khunsena went overboard, off the stern of the ship. The incident was captured on a ship security camera. A man listed as Khunsena's employer on his contract named Chaiyapruk Kowikai told Khunsena's family that he had jumped. The ship's captain then spent a day unsuccessfully searching the area to rescue him, before returning to fishing, Kowikai said. The vessel returned to port in Thailand roughly two months later. Police, company and insurance officials eventually concluded that Khunsena's death was likely a suicide. This claim seemed to be backed up by the onboard footage, which did not show anyone near him when he went over the side of the boat. In September, 2024, a reporting team from the Outlaw Ocean Project visited Khunsena's village. Settled by rice farmers about a century ago, Non Siao is located in Bua Lai District, Nakhon Ratchasima, roughly two hundred miles to the northeast of Bangkok. The reporting team interviewed Khusena's mother and cousin as well as the local labour inspector, police chief, aid worker and an official from the company that owned the ship. While the police and company officials said the death was likely a suicide, Khusena's family avidly disagreed. "Why would he jump?" said Palita, Khunsena's cousin, explaining why she highly doubted that Khusena took his own life. "He didn't have any problems with anyone." Sitting on the ground under an overcast sky as she spoke with the reporter in a follow-up conversation by video chat, Palita went silent and looked down at her phone. "He wanted to see me," added Khusena's mother, Boonpeng Khunsena, who also doubted his suicide, since he kept saying in calls that he intended to be home by Mother's Day. His family instead speculated that Khusena had likely witnessed a violent crime and therefore to silence him, he had been coerced to jump overboard. As is often the case with crimes at sea, where evidence is limited, witnesses are few and frequently unreliable, it is difficult to know whether Khusena died due to foul play. Perhaps, as his family speculated in interviews with The Outlaw Ocean Project, he had witnessed a violent crime and, consequently, had been forced to jump overboard. Perhaps, instead, he jumped willingly from the ship, a suicidal gesture likely driven by depression or mental health issues. In either scenario, the point remains the same: these distant-water ships are traveling so far from shore that the working and living conditions are brutal and sometimes violent. And these very conditions are likely playing a role in sinister outcomes. A transit route for migrants And yet, the human tragedy that criss-crosses this remote patch of high seas is not just tied to fishers. The Saya de Malha Bank has also become a transit route for migrants fleeing Sri Lanka. Since 2016, hundreds of Sri Lankans have attempted to make the perilous journey on fishing boats to the French-administered island of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, some making the journey directly from Saya de Malha. Those who do succeed in making landfall on Reunion are often repatriated. In one case, on December 7, 2023, a Sri Lankan vessel that had spent the previous three months fishing in Saya de Malha, the Imul-A-0813 KLT, illegally entered the waters around Reunion. The seven crew members were apprehended by local authorities and repatriated to Sri Lanka two weeks later. Joining them on the repatriation flight were crew members of two other Sri Lankan fishing vessels that had previously been detained by Reunion authorities. With near-shore stocks overfished in Thailand and Sri Lanka, vessel owners send their crews further and further from shore in search of a worthwhile catch. That is what makes the Saya de Malha – far from land, poorly monitored, and with a bountiful ecosystem – such an attractive target. But the fishers forced to work there live a precarious existence, and for some, the long journey to the Saya de Malha is the last they ever take. This article was written by Ian Urbina, Maya Martin, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan, and Austin Brush - Editors at The Outlaw Ocean Project. The Outlaw Ocean Project is a non-profit journalism organisation based in Washington DC that produces investigative stories about human rights, labour and environmental concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water. The organisation is run by Ian Urbina, an award-winning journalist who used to work for The New York Times.
France 24
13-05-2025
- Science
- France 24
In the Saya de Malha Bank, sharks are being hunted to extinction for their fins
In November 2022, several scientists in scuba gear dove over the side of a 440-foot research ship, which had been sent to the Saya de Mahla Bank, a vast seagrass meadow in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Seychelles, more than 200 miles from land. Their goal that day was to film sharks. When they were not diving, the scientists submerged a remote-controlled submarine to search the sea column. Ranked as one of the largest and most advanced research vessels in the world, the ship had been sent to this remote stretch by the environmental non-profit, Monaco Explorations, to document a seafloor famously lush in seagrass, corals, turtles, dugongs, rays, and other species. During the three weeks that the research team combed the waters of the Saya de Mahla Bank, they spotted not a single shark. The likely culprit, according to the scientists, was a fleet of more than 200 fishing ships that has, in recent years, targeted these remote waters, mostly from Taiwan, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. Many of these ships fish for tuna species such as albacore, yellowfin, skipjack, and bigeye, but they are also catching sharks in huge numbers. Sharks play a critical role in the ecosystem as guardians of the seagrass, hunting populations of turtles and other animals that would mow down all the seagrass if left unchecked. Catching sharks is not easy, nor is it usually inadvertent. In tuna longlining, the ship uses a line made of thick microfilament, with baited hooks attached at intervals. Many tuna longliners directly target sharks by using special steel leads designed not to break when the sharks, bigger and stronger than the tuna, try to yank themselves free. To avoid wasting space in the ship hold, deckhands usually throw the rest of the shark back into the water after they cut off the fins, which can sell for a hundred times the cost of the rest of the meat. It's a wasteful process and a slow death, as the sharks, still alive but unable to swim, sink to the seafloor. To offset poverty wages, ship captains typically allow their crew to supplement their income by keeping the fins to sell at port, off books. Precious fins In 2015, more than 50 Thai fishing vessels, primarily bottom trawlers, descended on the Saya de Malha Bank to drag their nets over the ocean floor and scoop up brushtooth lizardfish and round scad, much of which was transported back to shore to be ground into fishmeal. At least 30 of these vessels arrived in the Bank after fleeing crackdowns on fishing violations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The Thai fleet routinely targeted sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank, according to an investigation conducted by Greenpeace. Two survivors of trafficking who worked in the Saya de Malha Bank on two of the vessels – the Kor Navamongkolchai 1 and Kor Navamongkolchai 8 – told Greenpeace that up to 50 percent of their catch had been sharks. In 2016, a Thai government report found that 24 vessels returning from Saya de Malha Bank had committed fishing violations, mostly from a lack of valid fishing gear licenses. "The impact of the trawl fishery on seabed ecosystems is likely to have been catastrophic," reported a 2022 study by the environmental non-profit Monaco Explorations. Since then, the Thai presence in the Saya de Malha Bank has diminished, and in 2024 only two Thai vessels targeted the area. A flourishing trade The Sri Lankans and Taiwanese, however, have continued to fish the bank intensely. Of the more than 100 Sri Lankan vessels that have fished in the Saya de Malha since January 2022, when the country's fleet first began broadcasting vessel locations publicly, about half – or roughly 44 – used gillnets, according to vessel data from the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. These gillnetters operate across the Indian Ocean, and a number of the vessels were observed at the bank by the 2022 Monaco Explorations expedition. Sharks are especially vulnerable to gillnets, which account for 64 percent of shark catches recorded by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. On August 17, 2024, a video was posted to YouTube showing dozens of shark and ray carcasses recently unloaded from vessels in the Sri Lankan port of Beruwala. In the video, a man butchers one shark with a machete, dark blood pooling on the concrete of the harbour as he hacks at the body, removing its fins and hauling entrails from the carcass. Several videos showing similar scenes – hundreds of dead sharks, some without fins, being unloaded from fishing vessels and lined up on Sri Lankan harbours for sale to local exporters – have been uploaded to YouTube over the past two years. The videos offer a window on the booming trade that has decimated local shark populations. About two-thirds of Sri Lanka's domestic shark and ray species are listed as threatened by extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That threat has now moved further afield, to the high seas far from Sri Lankan shores, including to the Saya de Malha, putting yet more pressure on an ecosystem UNESCO has described as "globally unique", an underwater jewel that, should it disappear, could never be replaced. Historically, Sri Lankan vessels have targeted sharks in domestic waters. Between 2014 and 2016, for example, 84 percent of reported shark catches came from domestic vessels, according to research into the Sri Lankan shark and ray trade published in 2021. But as domestic populations declined, vessels, among them the fleet of gillnetters, moved to the high seas, leading to a new boom in the fin trade. Sri Lanka's annual exports of fins quadrupled in the last decade, according to UN Comtrade data, with 110 tons exported in 2023, primarily to Hong Kong, compared to just 28 tons in 2013. In 2024, tracking data also shows that over 40 of the Sri Lankan vessels did not publicly broadcast their location while in the Bank. This practice is a persistent barrier to ocean conservation, because it masks the true scale of the fleet or hides when these ships plan to engage in illegal behaviour. However, these "dark vessels" can be tracked by monitoring the signals from their fishing buoys. Sri Lankan vessels can have up to a dozen fishing buoys, each with its own unique identification signal, Sri Lankan fishing records indicate. 'Hidden' vessels At least one of these "hidden" vessels that fished in the Saya de Malha between March and June 2024, the IMUL-A-0064 KMN, was detained in August 2024 by Sri Lankan authorities with over half a ton of oceanic white-tip shark carcasses aboard, all with their fins removed. Catching oceanic white-tip sharks is prohibited under Sri Lankan law, as is the removal of shark fins at sea. This was not an isolated incident: Sri Lankan authorities have seized illegally harvested shark fins on at least 25 separate occasions since January 2021, according to press releases from the Sri Lankan Coast Guard. Though Taiwanese law does not allow vessels to engage in shark finning, the practice still takes place. In a sample of 62 Taiwanese vessels fishing on the high seas between 2018 and 2020, half engaged in shark finning, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation, which interviewed former crew on the ships. At least one of the Taiwanese vessels that fishes in the Saya de Malha, the Ho Hsin Hsing No. 601, was penalised in May 2023 for having dried shark fins in its vessel hold. The vessel operator was fined the equivalent of $123,000 and had their fishing license suspended for a month. The ship had last fished in the Saya de Malha between September and October 2022. But why should anyone care about the disappearance of sharks in the Saya de Malha Bank? Ernest Hemingway once described going bankrupt as something that happens gradually ... and then suddenly. The extinction of species is like bankruptcy, and when it finally occurs, there's no going back. If we keep draining the bank of one of its most precious resources, a "sudden" reckoning may be soon. This article was written by Ian Urbina, Maya Martin, Joe Galvin, Susan Ryan, and Austin Brush – Editors at The Outlaw Ocean Project. The Outlaw Ocean Project is a non-profit journalism organisation based in Washington DC that produces investigative stories about human rights, labour and environmental concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water. The organisation is run by Ian Urbina, an award-winning journalist who used to work for The New York Times.
