The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Corruption endangers world’s shrinking fisheries
WASHINGTON — As Indonesia’s fisheries minister, Edhy Prabowo was tasked with protecting one of his country’s most precious resources: baby lobsters so tiny one can fit on the tip of a finger.
The waters off the nation’s many islands and archipelagos had once teemed with lobster. But overfishing in recent decades decimated the crustacean’s 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, where the babies are raised to adulthood and sold mostly to dealers in China to meet its enormous demand for seafood.
Concerned that such harvesting 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 of 2020, the minister accepted a $77,000 bribe from a seafood supplier to grant it a permit to sell the hatchings abroad.
The money kept flowing. In his short stint as minister, Prabowo accepted bribes of nearly $2 million. He was arrested in 2020 by Indonesian authorities, having used the graft to purchase 26 road bikes, Old Navy children’s clothes, Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches and two luxury pens. Prabowo, 50, was sentenced to five years in prison for corruption. His attorney declined to comment.
Prabowo’s case is not an outlier. It’s emblematic of the corruption plaguing dozens of coastal developing countries that play a key role 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 AP found. The allegations range from high-ranking 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 catch ashore.
“Fisheries corruption can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and local communities that may depend on them,” said Ben Freitas, the manager of ocean policy at the World Wildlife Fund, based in Washington.
“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 industrialized countries have already overfished their own waters, forcing them to dispatch fleets of trawlers across the globe to meet growing seafood demand. People worldwide consume 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. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime warned in a 2019 report that failing to tackle corruption will lead to “significant financial, environmental and societal damages.”
Such corruption, the report added, “negatively affects developing countries in particular.”
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 lowlevel schemes, like one in India in which prosecutors last year alleged two fisheries officers extorted $1,100 to approve subsidies for a fish farm. Another involved fishermen reportedly bribing Malaysian officers with at least $11,000 for every boat they agreed not to report.
Some are much larger and involve global financial institutions. In 2021, the 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 $150 million to Mozambican government officials.
Stephen Akester, a fisheries management adviser who has worked in Africa and South Asia for four decades, said 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, even small dollars,” he said. “And that still continues today.”