A decision by the country’s highest court opens up nearshore waters to export-minded commercial trawlers, waters that had been reserved for the small-scale fishers who feed the nation.
Tag: fishing
Once teeming with seafood, Los Cerritos lagoon is now nearly barren due to rising sediment levels. As fishers struggle to make ends meet, many are forced to seek new livelihoods — or leave their homes behind.
American crayfish, introduced to Spain in the 1970s, have decimated Iberian crayfish populations. However, experts debate reintroducing Iberian crayfish, as they too may not actually be native to the region.
Currently, the majority of Turkey’s fish currently comes from cultivation, also known as fish farming, compared to just 10% two decades ago. The short-sightedness of this shift risks eliminating fishing output from both the farms and the open seas along Turkey’s 5,200 miles of coastline.
For the past two decades, Norway has developed an industrial and tourist sector around the king crab, a giant crustacean whose leg span can exceed two meters. But this boon for the economy of the great Norwegian north is now in more than a pinch.
Fishermen in war-torn Gaza are risking their lives by entering the Mediterranean despite relentless Israeli naval bombing. They say they have no option to feed their children amid a looming famine in the strip.
The number of pirogues leaving the African coast to reach the Canary Islands more than doubled in 2023. Among them are many Senegalese fishermen forced to leave because of the scarcity of fish resources that trawlers, some of them foreign, come to fish in their waters.
Fishermen bemoan dwindling catches as contamination by industrial waste and other pollutants raises concerns about the safety of food and drinking water.
Industrial-style farming should certainly be reimagined, but not with a guilt-ridden assault on the livelihoods of millions of farmers, herders and fishermen.
Trawling in Argentine waters is wiping out marine life in the southern Atlantic. Whatever the money stakes, Argentina must expand those territorial waters where all fishing is banned.
Not far from Rome’s international airport, the Royal Caribbean cruise ship company bought a state concession to try to build a massive new port to host its Oasis-class cruise ships – 72-meter-high skyscrapers on the sea. Locals in Fiumicino say one major transport hub in the area is more than enough.
Rwandan fishers dive into the silent waters of one of Africa’s largest lakes. The rhythms are relatively calm, but a lifetime of hard work rarely adds up to much where earning even a euro a day is a long shot.
The Persian Gulf has become lucrative fishing territory. Sharks, a threatened species, are being hunted to be used in cooking and medicines. Local fishermen are being arrested, but the operation involves people much higher up the food chain.
The Danish government has banned further growth in sea-based fish farming, claiming the country had reached the limit without endangering the environment. A marine biologist says it is a misguided policy for both economic and ecological reasons.
The post-Brexit row of fishing rights is the last straw for not only France, but all of the European Union, who must put an end to the whims of Britain’s prime minister, who seems ready to toss out years of negotiations for the divorce between the UK and EU.
Fishing nets, industry and other human-caused dumping are poisoning Russia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s largest, deepest (and oldest) lake. Bigger than all the North American Great Lakes combined, it’s at risk after 25 million years of life.
Magnet fishing isn’t what it might sound like. The pastime has nothing to do with pulling in big fish, but rather hooking treasures thanks to a long rope and a strong neodymium magnet cast into your local (polluted) body of water. The usual catches are hardly shiny trophies: discarded bicycles, shopping carts, tools, old boots, […]
It was a sunny, Scandinavian afternoon when Even Nord Rydningen spotted something in the still waters beneath Oslo’s Gullhaug bridge. “It looked like a trout, but it also looked a bit like a shark,” he told Norwegian daily Aftenposten. Upon closer inspection, Rydningen realized it was in fact a pike, a sharp-toothed (but tasty) species […]
A new Greenpeace report warns that foreign fishing fleets, mostly from China, are gobbling up every bit of marine life they can into ‘stadium-sized’ nets.
London is using the fishing issue in hopes of breaking the EU’s united front.
When Pakistani fisherman Abdul Karim Bhatti, who had been a prisoner in India for seven months, was flown home to Karachi, Pakistan, at the end of July, his family didn’t rejoice. They were receiving his dead body. The only information they received was that he died on July 1 at the B.K. Hospital, Bhuj. Or so stated the death certificate, a bilingual document in English and Gujrati, issued on July 9 by the government of the state of Gujrat. No postmortem was carried out. The Indian maritime security forces had arrested Bhatti, along with other fishermen, on January 8 and […]
A dozen dead and mutilated seals, together with a few porpoises, have recently been found on Polish beaches in the Baltic Sea. How did it get to this?
On the coast of Senegal, fish stocks have fallen 80% in the past year alone. The women fish processors of the region have been hit hardest, with consequences across society.
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has been waging a war on illegal fishing since the election two years ago of President Joko Widodo, who’d vowed to curtail poaching when he was running for office. But the crackdown on poachers has damaged legal fishermen as well, leading to a fall in fish exports, fewer jobs, and […]
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Need A Bigger Boat
Don’t worry: This little vessel in the port of Caraquet, New Brunswick, was not about to crash down. It was simply attached to the hull of a bigger fishing boat.
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Sizzling Sardines
Once the fish had been caught, the fisherman’s wife in Nazaré would put them directly on the grill for breakfast. Bom apetite!
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The Bigger Picture
The 1960s was a momentous period for the French island of Corsica, caught between opening up to tourism and dealing with a growing nationalistic movement. But in Ajaccio on that sunny spring day, it was just fishing business as usual.
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Fishing Fashion
I’ve already told you about the fishermen’s wives of Nazaré, and the seven petticoats they’d wear traditionally in this Portuguese town. The fishermen“s costumes are just as interesting. Although granted, they do look a little bit like pajamas.
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Superstitious Boats
The colorful Maltese fishing boats called luzzus are said to date back to Phoenician times. They’re famous for the small pair of eyes drawn on their hulls — an ancient superstition supposed to ward off evil and bring protection to the fishermen.
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Seven Skirts
The fishermen“s wives of yore used to wear seven colorful petticoats; some say to represent the seven waves in a set, others say to keep warm while awaiting their husbands’ return. In the late 1950s, these women working at Nazaré“s seafood market already considered it folklore, as they found it doubtlessly easier to carry their […]
The Quirimbas islands in northwestern Mozambique is the front line in the war on over-fishing.
MAMBURAO — In partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), those who fish the waters here in the town of Mamburao are using traditional handlines rather than large trawler nets in the deep waters off Mindoro Strait, in a bid to position the area as a Philippine hub of sustainable tuna fishing. With traditional handlines, or kawil, they catch only the mature and high-quality tuna. “We go out there into the Mindoro Strait, about 300 fishermen in several boats,” says the Tuna Fisheries Association’s Roberto Cueto. “When we’re not catching much, we stay there for days.” But Cueto, who started […]
Lake Burullus, the country’s second-largest natural lake, which yields a third of all the fish sold in Egypt, is slowly being ruined, as are family businesses.
Can fish get sore scales? Without a doubt, says the Federal Ethics Commission for Non-Human Biotechnology domaine (CENH), in a report released this week. It found that there is “no reason to conclude that fish are insensitive” to pain. Until the 1980s it was commonly believed that fish behaved more or less like machines and […]
ZAHEDAN — Three tons of “rotting” sardines were among thousands of dead fish from the Oman Sea that have washed onto Iran’s southern coast in recent days, in and around the port of Konarak. Local fishermen have blamed trawlers — the vast nets that sweep the sea floor in industrial fishing — and have urged […]
It’s been 20 years since the U.S. had troops in the Philippines. With new plans in the works for a Filippino-U.S. base-sharing, much has changed – both locally and geopolitically.
PALAWAN — Chito Villarin starts up the engine of his small fishing boat. The 36-year old makes his living by sailing into the waters of the South China Sea, off Palawan’s west coast, in the hopes of bringing back a good catch. “I catch different types of fish and octopus,” he says, adding that he travels about 20 kilometers into the water. But Filipino fishermen like Villarin aren’t the only ones casting off into these waters. Foreign poachers are frequently found off the coast of Palawan, and the authorities here are trying to stop them. “Narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, terrorism, […]
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A Day’s Catch
The port city of Sfax was a mix of coastal ease and urban grit. Here, 10 local fishermen split the land/seascape in two.
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Fresh From The Bosphorus
In 1968, Istanbul’s Galata Bridge was already famous for its throngs of fishermen. They would present their catch on the bright red trays you can see in the foreground. We bought two (don’t ask me to remember what kind of fish!) and had them grilled nearby.
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Two Men In A Boat
In contrast with the imposing river that flows through Vienna and Budapest, the Danube Delta is sleepy and accessible. It was noon and the sun was high, so this Romanian fisherman decided it was as good a time as any to open a bottle — and who was I to disagree?