Tag Archives: Spain
Nerja fishermen given 15-month jail sentence for catching thresher shark
Francisco Pastor comes from a long line of Nerja fishermen. At 50, he says he is going through an ordeal that “I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.” Since November 2020, he has been serving a sentence for having had “the bad luck” of catching a thresher shark, an endangered species,,, Pastor, who was sentenced along with his cousin, to 15 months in prison, along with a three year ban from fishing and a suspended fine of 386,000 euros for a crime against wildlife. “I need a job, whatever it is, because I can’t go out fishing with my boat, which was how I made a living until just over a year ago,” >click to read< 21:46
Tastes better
Every day it seems to become just a little more obvious that the future of the commercial salmon business is on land no matter what Alaskans might think about where the tastiest fish are to be found. This week the news is from northern Spain where a company named Norcantabric,,,On its website, the company boasts that its farm will produce salmon that are “fresh, reduces transport time up to 5 days; 100 percent natural, without antibiotics, free of toxins, heavy metals and other artificial materials, without hormones, without sea lice and free of parasites. There are long term implications here for an Alaska commercial fishing industry once the economic mainstay of the territory, and for decades after Statehood, the 49th state’s largest employer. >click to read< 16:50
Will Britain lose another fishing war?
On average, a fish in the North Sea crosses five territorial waters frontiers every day. They don’t have passports or face quarantine. Britain made a fool of itself during the three cod wars it fought with Iceland between 1956 and 1976. British fishermen decided these were “traditional” waters and the Royal Navy was sent in to try and intimidate the Icelandic fishing boats. Other than geo-thermal energy, banking and airlines, the main Icelandic product is cod. They depended on hauling cod of out the northern waters close to Arctic Circle — we looked absurd trying to stop them. Does a new fish war with France, the Netherlands, and Spain now loom? The problem arises partly from the 1982 UN Law of the Sea convention which extended territorial waters out to 200 km. >click to read< 10:09
Stranded at Sea in The Time of Coronavirus
Spanish fisherman Josu Bilbao boarded a Qatar Airways flight headed for the Seychelles in January, just as he had done for the past 15 years. Ahead of him, four uninterrupted months of hauling tuna out of the glistening Indian Ocean. As it turned out, catching the fish was the least of the problems for the 56-year-old captain of Albatun Tres, one of the world’s largest tuna fishing boats. The coronavirus then swept the world, countries shut borders, planes stopped flying and Spain became one of the countries worst hit by the virus. Bilbao and his crew were stuck. As the Indian Ocean fleet shift was extended ship owners tried to figure out a way to get workers home. Aboard the ship avoiding infection became the priority. >click to read< 09:43
Coronavirus: Fishermen cannot land their catch in France
The problem is not that boats are not able to land their catches, the issue is that restaurants in France, Italy and Spain have closed down, which has hit the demand for seafood. Fisherman Dougal Lane said it was very worrying. ‘The whole shellfish side of the industry has shut down, the crab and lobster boats, because the European market has crashed and, of course, the other market was China, so the market for shellfish has absolutely come to a standstill. >click to read< 10:04
China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan and S Korea account for 85% global fishing efforts
The research, led by scientists at Global Fishing Watch, a research organization that uses satellite data to track fishing activity, examined some 22 billion ship-location data points for more than 70,000 industrial fishing vessels between 2012 and 2016. It found commercial fishing hotspots in the northeast Atlantic and northwest Pacific, as well as in nutrient-rich areas off the coasts of South America and West Africa. The study also found that fleets from just five countries — China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea — account for more than 85% of fishing efforts in the high seas. >click to read< 09:51
Spain’s 3,000-Year-Old Tuna Harvest in Pictures
Atlantic bluefin tuna are among the most hunted species on the planet and one of the best ways to see the effects of an increasingly industrialized food chain. But for a few short weeks during early summer on Spain’s southern coast, an ancient ritual known as the almadraba still plays out—an intense, intimate, and violent tradition that strives to harvest some of the world’s most valuable seafood in a sustainable manner. Photographer Michael Magers traveled to Spain in 2015 to join a small crew of fisherman in the economically depressed town of Barbate and document the spectacle. Click here to view the images 08:45
Another fishing industry bashing article – this time it’s fuel subsidy
Here are some excerpts from the recent Guardian’s fuel subsidy article: “Fuel subsidies ‘drive fishing industry’s plunder of the high seas’ Spain, France, UK, US and Japan among countries giving generous fuel subsidies enabling industrial fishing far offshore, says Global Ocean Commission Read more here 10:06
