Poaching in Jamaican waters

The illegal harvesting of finfish and shellfish by Honduran fishermen in Jamaican waters goes back decades. They having overfished their own seas, depleting their own stock of economically valuable marine resources. Although Jamaican waters are the most overfished in the region in terms of finfish, Jamaica has the largest remaining stock of conch in the world, and still quite a bit of lobster left on our offshore banks. Our local consumption of conch and lobster (which we can collectively refer to as shellfish) is quite small and, as a result, we still have commercial quantities of these marine resources in our waters. It is our shellfish stock that is attracting the Hondurans.

This is not a small man's game, conducted by 'sufferers' trying to earn 'a bread'; it is big business involving substantial capital investment by quite wealthy people. The divers are Miskito Indians, expendable small fry to the owners, but the boat captain and engineer are in a different class.

Let me tell you how the system works. The fishing enterprise is conducted by a fairly large fishing vessel (called a 'mother ship') on to which is tied about 40 small canoes. The mother ship sails into Jamaican waters into an area they have not previously cleaned out, and then the 40 canoes are launched, each with three or four men. Either they use scuba gear (the divers swim freely underwater, breathing from tanks of compressed air on their back) or they use hooka rigs (the divers breathe air from hoses connected to a low-pressure compressor in the boat above).

Using spearguns or Hawaiian slings to catch lobsters, or their bare hands to harvest conch, these divers can quickly depopulate a large area of all its economically valuable living marine resources. They then go back to the mother ship, and move to a new, relatively untouched area.

Territory hard to patrol

Jamaica has quite a large exclusive economic zone (EEZ) - 263,283km² or more than 25 times the size of the land area of Jamaica. The Pedro Bank alone is 8,040km² or about two-thirds the land area of Jamaica. Talk to any Jamaica Defence Force Coastguard officer and you will quickly appreciate the difficult job they have enforcing Jamaica's fisheries laws. These poachers will do anything and everything to avoid being captured.

Although the JDF Coastguard cutter can detect the foreign vessels on their radar, the poachers probably see them first, since our cutters are bigger. Often, the first thing the mother ship does when its crew sees the cutter coming is to abandon the 60-80 divers in the water and flee towards Honduras. Our vessel then has to abandon the chase, and enforcement has to morph into rescue. The poor Miskitos have no money to pay fines, and our Government then has to spend money to repatriate them.

Our Coastguard cutters have no difficulty running down the mother boats; we can do 20+ knots, while the most they can do is 15 knots. The problem is getting them to stop. They won't respond to the "warning shot across their bows", and continue at top speed towards Honduras. So the cutter tries disabling fire, to shut down the engines. They often try to ram our vessel at high speed.

The next task is to board them and escort the fishers to port. The trespassers don't want their boats to be boarded, and resist the boarding party with poles and hooks. Usually they drop their outriggers to make boarding difficult. They will often attack the boarding party. The risk intensifies at night and with rough seas. Force has to be used.

With the cholera scare in Honduras, their high-priced lawyer would claim that some of the fishers on board were infected, and they would often be quickly hustled away with their catch without even going to court. Some years ago, our timid courts would fine them $100 per fisher and $1,000 for the captain and let them go; neither the catch, the gear nor the vessel would be forfeited. In fact, often the vessel was allowed to sell part of their illegal catch to pay the fine! Later, as our courts got braver, the catch and gear were forfeited, but not the vessel. I understand that recently, in a fit of bravado, one vessel was forfeited.

We must prosecute all poachers caught to the fullest extent of the law. And we must protest, in the strongest possible terms, to the Honduran government about the violation of our EEZ by its vessels. What I am afraid of is that when our fishers break down at sea and drift into foreign waters, they may face retaliatory - and even deadly - force.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and fisheries management consultant. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com

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