Hidden Frontier
HIGH SEAS SERIES | What we don’t see causes the most harm.
Children clutch at the shopping cart handle as they roll seamlessly across the glazed concrete of the Costco warehouse. They turn sharply into an aisle, giggling as their mother swiftly prevents their collision with a freezer. She pushes the cart out of the way and opens the freezer door. She sighs; everything is almost out of stock. Pressing her face against the door, she reaches into the cold, clawing at the product she wants.
She finally gets ahold of their favorite fish filets. She tosses them in the spinning cart.
In Tokyo’s Toyosu market, sales aren’t too shabby.
A bluefin tuna just went for a record three million.
8,600 miles away, along the Ghanaian coastline, a different type of fish market has awoken with the dawn. Canoes fill the canal. Dexterous hands pass the catch from one canoe to another, all the way up to the many narrow docks. Fishmongers weave through the crowd with aluminum bowls of fish balanced on their heads. Bustling markets are the heart — the lifeline and culture — of so many port towns.
The full bellies of the wide canoes are signs of a successful catch. The rhythmic transport chain of fishermen passing fish to the next canoe in line shows no sign of stopping. Vendors line the market streets as one would expect.
But there is something different about this market.
It’s the smell. The fishing equipment on the canoes. Or rather, the lack thereof.
The sound of metal clattering to the ground jumps out from the cacophonous ambiance of the market. One aluminum bowl of fish has fallen, its contents now strewn about. On the ground lays a sight out of place in a market full of life.
A single block of frozen fish.
A Filipino man, Eril Andrade, has a problem: his petite stature of 5’1”. He had studied criminology in hopes of becoming a police officer only to find that the job had a minimum height requirement of 5’3”. He knew now that he wouldn’t see big city life. Instead, he would be stuck in his small town of Linabuan Sur, in a low-wage job — 50 cents a night — with no capacity to support his family.
Then, his luck changed: Another job prospect.
His cousin introduced to him the prospect of working out at sea, on a fishing vessel. Just like that, he met a representative of the Singaporean fishing recruiting company ‘Step Up’. She had a promising deal for him: a $500 monthly wage.
He was off to Manilla on his 31st birthday. The perfect birthday present.
But it became apparent that at some point, his luck changed again.
In a matter of seven months, his Eril Andrad’s arrived in Linabuan Sur in a wooden coffin. It was frozen, black and bruised, and labeled — as though he was nothing more than the fish set out to caught — with a curt note.
Sick and resting.
You likely find yourself trying to connect these stories but don’t know how. You know they have a collective meaning; if they didn’t, why would I write them together?
You’re correct. So, here is that last piece of the puzzle and a reframing.
A woman innocently buys fish filets at a Costco.
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Two fishing markets in two corners of the world have something to hide in their auction houses, behind their public markets.
Another market turns profits off of a large, slow-maturing species.
A fishing village is left with nothing to catch and now survives on purchased, frozen fish from surrounding foreign industrial vessels.
A Philipino man returns from his contract fishing job on the open ocean sealed in a coffin, obviously abused.
There is a sole source of connection between these stories:
Fishing.
I’m not talking about the family fishing trip to the lake house. Not about the fishing poles on your local boardwalk. Not about sport fishing stands in tourist towns. Not even about coastal seafood and fishing operations.
I’m not writing about the fishing that you can see. Rather, the fishing that you can’t.
In reading this, you must lose sight of land. We must travel beyond that, into what is — in more ways than one — an endless, watery unknown:
The high seas.
The high seas fishing industry.
Our world’s oceans aren’t spared borders of their own. Within 200 nautical miles of any given coastline is considered to be a part of an EEZ, or exclusive economic zone. In other words, it is under the jurisdiction of the country it borders. As per its name, it usually fosters economically beneficial industries such as tourism and resource extraction industries. Law can be carried out with a standard and a level of certainty.
It is past those 200 nautical miles where an individual nation’s authority ends.
But it is past those 200 nautical miles where our story–and the international domain called the high seas–begins.
The high seas fall under international jurisdiction and lie beyond the reach of the media, public eye, and law. With its ambiguous nature comes costs.
A perfect landscape for lawlessness. A blurry standard of jurisdiction. A cover for human exploitation. A lost sense of limit.
A perfect segway into the global seafood supply.
This is an introduction to my series on the high seas fishing industry. A single article cannot do the complexity of this issue justice. I have dug into many journal articles about the economic, environmental, and social spheres of this industry as well as into the work of New York Times journalist Ian Urbina.
And I want to share all I have learned.
I need to share all I have learned. Stay tuned.
Source information is in the comments.
