Corruption puts the world’s shrinking fisheries in danger
As Indonesia’s fisheries minister, Edhy Prabowo was tasked with protecting one of his country’s most precious resources: Baby lobsters so tiny that one can fit on the tip of a finger.
The waters off the nation’s many islands and archipelagos once teemed with lobster. But overfishing in recent decades had decimated the population, so much so that fishermen turned to catching the hatchlings. They scooped them up by the thousand and shipped them to Vietnamese lobster farms to be raised to adulthood and sold – mostly to dealers in China, to meet its enormous demand for seafood.
Concerned that this was harming lobster populations, Indonesia’s fishing ministry in 2016 prohibited the export of the tiny crustaceans. Shortly after taking office, Prabowo lifted the ban.
Court documents show that just a month later, in June 2020, the minister accepted a US$77,000 (NZ$122,000) bribe from a seafood supplier to grant it a permit to sell the hatchlings abroad.
The money kept flowing. In his short stint as minister, Prabowo accepted bribes of nearly US$2 million.
Prabowo was arrested in 2020 by Indonesian authorities, having used the graft to purchase, among other things, 26 road bikes, Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches, and luxury pens. He was sentenced to five years in prison for corruption.
Prabowo’s case is not an outlier. It’s emblematic of the corruption plaguing dozens of coastal developing countries that are key in managing some of the world’s most threatened fishing grounds, according to experts and a review of criminal case files and media reports by the AP.
At least 45 government officials have been accused of corruption in the past two decades. The allegations range from highranking officials like Prabowo accepting large payments from fishing companies to obtain lucrative contracts, to low-level civil servants accepting a few thousand dollars to ignore fishermen bringing illegal catches ashore.
‘‘Fisheries corruption can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and local communities that may depend on them,’’ says Ben Freitas, the manager of ocean policy at the World Wildlife Fund. ‘‘Countries with weak governments that lack oversight and accountability are more susceptible to corruption risk.
‘‘And that is where fisheries corruption plays a pernicious role in overfishing. It can lead to the overexploitation of resources. It is a global problem.’’
The situation is most critical in areas managed by developing nations because many industrialised countries have already overfished their own waters, forcing them to dispatch fleets of trawlers across the globe to meet growing demand for seafood.
People worldwide are consuming twice as much seafood as they did five decades ago, according to United Nations estimates, and 35% of stocks are considered overfished, up from 10%.
Many coastal developing countries depend on fish for millions of jobs and to meet the dietary needs of their populations.
Those wishing to conceal their operations or pay bribes to get around restrictions have found fishing to be a welcoming industry. Companies have little trouble changing the name or flag state of a fishing boat, and it’s common practice to register vessels under shell companies in Liberia or the Marshall Islands.
Scofflaw ships are known to turn off their location tracking devices, offload illegally caught fish to other boats, or ‘‘launder’’ it by mixing it with their standard catch.
The AP review found that most cases of corruption and graft were low-level schemes. Some are much larger and involve global financial institutions.
In 2021, Swiss bank Credit Suisse admitted to fraudulently
financing a massive loan to Mozambique to expand its tuna fishing fleet. A contractor handling the loan paid kickbacks of US$150m to Mozambican government officials.
Stephen Akester, a fisheries management adviser who has worked in Africa and South Asia for four decades, says there is a long history of foreign companies – particularly from China – forging corrupt relationships with fisheries officials.
‘‘They exploited the weakness of these governments for whom any kind of revenue was big money. And that still continues today.’’
In Gambia, a small West African nation nestled along Senegal’s coast, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Fisheries and Water Resources, Bamba Banja, was charged in 2021 with accepting a bribe from a Chinese company to free a vessel detained for illegal fishing.
According to charging documents, an employee of Golden
Lead Company Ltd told Gambian authorities that he and another shareholder in 2018 gave Banja 100,000 Gambian dalasi (about US$1600) to release the ship. The case is ongoing, and Banja denies any wrongdoing.
Authorities in Namibia allege that an Icelandic seafood company paid roughly US$6m in bribes to Namibian officials to be permitted to fish in the country’s waters. The so-called ‘‘Fishrot’’ scandal first came to light four years ago. Namibia’s former fisheries minister and justice minister are still on trial.
Corruption is not limited to developing countries. A top European fisheries official in 2019 was linked to a criminal network that sought to launder illegally caught bluefin tuna that arrived in Spain from Italy and Malta via French ports. The director of Malta’s fisheries remains suspended as investigators with the Spanish Civil Guard probe whether she helped the criminal syndicate bypass European Union tuna quotas.
The cases reviewed by AP are likely to represent a small fraction of the corruption that takes place daily as hauls of seafood are transported and sold around the world.
Most cases go undetected, says Adam Graycar, a professor of public policy at the University of Adelaide who has spent much of his career studying corruption.
‘‘You have inspectors colluding with fishing boat owners. Nobody’s going to tell you what’s happening or give you any data.’’
In Ghana, for instance, the fishing ministry has been unmarked by major corruption scandals. Yet the Environmental Justice Foundation, which has investigated abuses in the fishing sector for two decades, issued a report last year documenting how the West African nation has become ensnared in ‘‘a culture of corruption in which bribery and intimidation pervades all levels of fisheries management’’.
‘‘The environmental and social injustices resulting from the current status quo are myriad, with fishing communities disproportionately bearing the burden of a broken system,’’ the group concluded.
Kyei Kwadwo Yamoah, who advocates for better fisheries management in Ghana as convenor of the Fisheries Alliance, says the government had penalised some companies, but others are granted a renewed fishing licence without question.
Overfishing and illegal fishing have pushed Ghana’s fish stocks to near collapse, prompting presidential action, and putting the livelihoods and the health of millions of Ghanaians at risk.
The situation, Yamoah says, is growing dire. Some days, fishermen spend all day on the water and come back with nothing.
‘‘Fisheries corruption can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and local communities that may depend on them.’’
Ben Freitas,
World Wildlife Fund