25 minutes
10:00:12 SYNC: It’s been a long journey but we finally got here, where the Sahara meets the sea
10:00:23 COMM: Mauritania in West Africa…is one of the poorest countries on earth.
But it has one thing the world wants…fish.
.
SYNC: they are going to beat the water , and apparently the fish jump in the nets”
10: 00:47 COMM: But this is the national park not the real Mauritania. Over the horizon is the European Union’s fishing fleet it is headed South, to trawl Mauritania’s waters.
We get Mauritania’s fish, they get desperately needed cash.
The politicians say it’s good for everyone. We were beginning a journey to see if they’re right.
10:01:13
10:01:23 COMM: In Mauritania almost everyone lives by the sea. The desert has driven them there.
SYNC: Look at that it’s just flat sahara for as far as you can see. And it’s so hot.
10:01:40 COMM: Our destination was Mauritania’s main fishing port, Nouadhibou.
10:01:52 Down at the waterfront people there was a group of angry fishermen. They were angry with Europe. Angry with the Mauritanian government.
SYNC: It’s a very strange atmosphere. Something seems to have happened and we’re going to try and find out what.
COMM: The fishermen here go out in motorised canoes. They call them pirogues.
SYNC: Okay.. There was an accident last night with a pirogue and it hasn’t come back and they are going to go and look for it.
SYNC: Three of them were saved and brought in by another pirogue but one is still missing.
10:02:32 They blamed Europe. In exchange for 54 million pounds a year around 250 EU boats can fish these waters. Locals said they now had to go out further and longer for a decent catch. And that cost lives.
SYNC: Normally the pirogue has many fewer people on it than that but they are all desperate to get out there and look for their colleague.
10:02:56 COMM: But they didn’t expect to find 17-year-old Mohammed Vall. 290 local fishermen have lost their lives in the last year.
10:03:10 We searched for the owner of the missing boat. Half a million people, a fifth of the population, rely on fishing. It’s not just the Europeans who are exploiting Mauritania’s waters. On a much smaller scale, the Russians, Chinese, Koreans and Japanese have all made deals.
10:03:35 Baye Gueye was just back from the waterfront.
It turned out he owned eight boats. His teenage sons were at sea that very moment.
SYNC: He says before the big boats arrived there were plenty of fish but now its all changed.
10:03:53 My catches are a tenth of what they were, he complained.
He said he’d given his sons mobile phones because pirogues were being sunk by trawlers sneaking into the rich waters close to shore reserved for local fishermen.
SYNC: He says that this happens every night
SYNC: So there are incursions……He says all the boats are doing this. European, chinese Korean. They are all coming into the zone at night which is completely forbidden in the agreement.
10:04:37 COMM: A few days before a neighbour had been killed in this kind of accident. Baye Gueye took me to see the dead man’s brothers.
They said it had happened at night. It seemed a trawler had cut his boat in two.
SYNC: There were 5 people on this pirogue and four of them knew how to swim but his brother didn’t know how to swim and went down with the boat.
SYNC: it was a European boat that hit the pirogue
10:05:23 COMM: I arranged to return later.
I wanted to meet the survivors to corroborate the accusation. But it didn’t happen.
PTC:: Secret police… ….
10:06:04 COMM: We drove a few miles outside the port. Mauritania used to have its own fleet of trawlers. Not any more. For five years Europe has kept much of its heavily subsidised fleet in work in these waters. Mauritanian trawlermen can’t compete.
It was time to travel out to the European boats.
I had arranged a rendezvous. A hospital ship looking after European fishermen was going to dock and give me a ride out to the fleet.
02”01 SYNC: Hello….. Esperanza Del Mar, Esperanza Del Mar
10:06:55 But an emergency had kept them at sea. I needed to find another way to visit the European fleet.
I’d spotted.some dilapidated fishing boats operated by foreign fishermen who’d settled in Nouadibhou. I tried to find one that would take me out to sea. It was difficult. Helping journalists, I was told, could mean trouble with the authorities.
But eventually I persuaded a crew to help. Their boat was called the Al Tawfiq,
At dawn the next morning we prepared to leave the port in search of the European Union fleet.
We were told they were at least five hours out to sea.
10:07:53 Our Spanish captain Bravlio Garcia was sure he could persuade one of the Spanish trawlers who make up three quarters of the fleet to let me on board.
As well as the Spanish boats there are also Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and even an Irish supertrawler.
10:08:24 Twenty five miles out we finally spotted them. Each can catch in a day, what a local fishermen takes in a year.
Captain Garcia began asked the first group of trawlers we’d seen if they would let us on board. They said they were flattered but they preferred not to be on television.
We were still optimistic. All around us we could see European trawlers. Captain Garcia tracked down a Spanish trawler he was sure would take us.
10:09:12 He started his sales pitch on our behalf. Within minutes it was clear the word “reporter” was complicating matters badly..
SYNC: We’ve just managed to just literally flag this one down, but we’ve contacted the captain, it’s a spanish boat, and he won’t give us permission to board….
SYNC: That’s a huge net
COMM: These boats have high-tec equipment to hunt down shoals of fish. But even their average catch has dropped by two thirds in recent years. The number of fish in these waters is plummeting.
10:10:02 And one of the Al Tawfiq’s crew told me that he feared the EU boats were doing permanent damage. The problem he said, lay in the heavy nets they dragged along the seabed.
SYNC: He’s explaining that the problem with boats like this that fish the sea bed is that they smash all the rocks and hiding places for the octopus and the deep water fish. When that happens..the..whole chain is broken.
10:10:37 COMM: We tried for hours to get on board a trawler but with no success. A storm was closing in so we headed back.
On the way they picked up their fish traps. Like the pirogue fishermen they say they’re only catching a tenth of what they used to.
The World Wildlife Fund for Nature says the current level of fishing off Mauritanian is unsustainable.
SYNC: We just had 11 hours. It was stomach turning to be quite honest
COMM: Every fisherman I spoke to said these waters were being overfished. But in this authoritarian country few would do so on camera. However Manuel Prieto, a Spanish captain living here, did speak out.
He told me that a scientific study had recommended a 25 per cent in the number of octopus and squid caught from the seabed. Some hope! The EU has just negotiated a 37 per cent increase.
SYNC: He says basically the industrial fishing boats are just destroying these waters. They are ruining the seabed and he has got to go much further out to get his catch.
COMM: He knows it can’t go on.
SYNC: Termine…I think that …. I think that’s quite clear. He saying that he thinks that if it continues as it is at the moment it’s finished for everybody including the fish.
10:12:20 COMM: The military unit which polices the agreement had finally agreed to take us on patrol. We jumped at the chance. In two weeks we’d seen them leave port on only one other occasion.
They told us they’d be inspecting European trawlers. The rules are strict about what and where these boats can fish.
At first, the trawler ignored the frantic signals. Finally her crew cut the engines. They were astonished at being stopped.
10:12:57 When I boarded I discovered this wasn’t a European boat but politically, a far easier target: a trawler owned by Mauritanians in partnership with the Chinese.
10:13:10 The patrol glanced at the catch and the size of the nets. Then the commander quickly checked the paperwork. To me it seemed he was going through the motions for my benefit.
10:13:30 Within five minutes we were leaving, with the commander giving a slightly awkward lecture about the need to stop for his patrol boat.
10:13:44 I assumed we’d be off in search of EU trawlers. But they told me their boat wasn’t designed to go out that far. And the two patrol boats that could were both out of action.
Instead we chased a local boat suspected of fishing where it shouldn’t.
It seemed perverse that they were targeting the small fry instead of the EU trawlers. After all we’d heard repeated allegations that the trawlers fish where they shouldn’t, use illegally sized nets, and catch fish they’re not licensed to.
10:14:19 The crew were told to report to the police back in port. A 13-year old boy was taken as security.
10:14:29 We headed back towards Nouadhibou. Another storm was brewing. Suddenly the patrol flagged down another pirogue they said was fishing in a conservation area.
SYNC: It’s getting crowded on here we’ve just taken another hostage.
10:14:50 COMM: The crew faced a hefty fine.
The storm was getting worse. Most fishermen had already returned to port .
I wondered what would happen to those caught far out to sea.
10:15:11 On the quayside a row erupted. While the pirogue owners argued with the commander, I spoke to one of the arrested fishermen. He described a daily battle for Mauritania’s fish.
SYNC: He says that they absolutely have to go into that zone to find the fish that they want. And they’ll probably get fined, but that’s the way it is.
10:15:47 COMM: One of the leaders of Mauritania’s local fishermen had arrived back in town.
He’d been in Brussels while the latest version of the EU agreement was negotiated.
I was told I’d find him was inspecting a pirogue which had limped back to port after colliding with a trawler.
NAT SOUND.
COMM: Si’d Ahmed told me the crew were lucky to be alive.
10:16:14 He believes the whole EU deal is a catastrophe.
What makes matters worse, he said, is that the local fishermen aren’t seeing a penny of the money Europe pays the Mauritanian government.
10:16:31 And it’s not just the fishermen. He took me to a processing plant. They’d just unloaded that day’s fish from the pirogues.
The catch wasn’t enough to keep the factory busy.
10:16:49 Si’d Ahmed wants EU boats to start landing their catches here instead of taking them to Europe. But under the new agreement, except for a few token visits, he told me it wasn’t going to happen.
SYNC: He says that it doesn’t make sense for the people here if the fish aren’t unloaded here then they don’t gain anything, any extra value and that’s the fault of the accord.
10:17:16 COMM: There’s a further twist. Many of the fish taken from these waters by the EU will be will be processed in Spain and sent back in tins.
In his office were pictures of all the local fishermen. Blank spaces marked the dead.
SYNC: These ones here, photographs which have been taken off, it says decede – died.
10:17:44 COMM: I left Si’d Ahmed in despair: over the deaths, the declining catches, the grinding poverty.
10:17:59 COMM: We’d been with the Mauritanian military out at sea. Now I was given a chance to fly in their surveillance plane.
This aircraft is supposed to check that EU trawlers don’t stray into vital spawning grounds or the areas reserved for local fishermen.
We climbed over Nouadibhou. We passed over one of three radars stations which help the plane spot offenders. A few days before it had been out of action.
10:18:38 Under Mauritanian law EU trawlers can be fined and have their catch confiscated if they break the rules. But the courts require hard evidence.
That means using a special camera which photographs the boat and automatically records its position. I asked where it was.
10:18:58 SYNC: He says they normally have a camera but it’s out of action today…
COMM: I’d been told that if EU boats broke the rules it was at night.
The crew told me the plane doesn’t fly at night.
10:19:10 The time had come to go the country’s capital to ask the Mauritanian government why it thinks the fishing agreement is such a good deal.
10:19:25 Nouakchott is home to the ruling elite: They’re Arab Moors who have little in common with the fishermen. This country is deeply divided on racial lines.
SYNC: Well, we’ve spent weeks trying to see someone from the government and today it looks like we are going to get an interview with the minister of fisheries.
10:19:50 COMM: Mohammed El Moktah Ould Zamen was irritated when I asked him whether he’d just sold the country’s birthright. Mauritania needs cash, he said. Why shouldn’t we sell our fish? It’s a simple equasion.
10:20:05 SYNC: Europe has more boats than fish to catch. Mauritania has more fish than boats to catch it.
COMM: He denied that fish stocks were threatened. And he said he hoped that in the future more European trawlers would pay to fish his waters.
SYNC: He says what the European boats pay for fishing here is much more significant than what the Mauritanian boats can put into the economy.
10:20:30 COMM: He’s right. The EU deal brings in 50 per cent of this country’s hard currency. For the government, a guaranteed pay cheque…as long as the fish last.
SYNC: Since we got here the local fishermen have been telling us that the trawlers – including EU boats fish illegally. We knew the authorities must have the statistics but they just wouldn’t give them to us. Today we are really pleased because we finally got them.
10:20:56 SYNC: OK So far this year there have been 222 violations….. Spain, Spain, Spain, Spain, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Portugal. …There is an Italian one in here. Most of them are Spanish and some of them, some of them have been busted five or six times.
COMM: We’d seen for ourselves that the agreement was policed with a light touch. But even so in the previous eight months sixty EU trawlers had been caught fishing illegally.
10:21:18 I went to the offices of the European Union.
I hoped to speak to someone about illegal fishing and the new deal with Mauritania that had been signed three weeks before. Not a chance.
10:21:34 SYNC: Apparently no-one from the European Union office here is authorised to speak to us, everything has to come from Brussels. But they have given us a three page press release which we got off the internet 3 weeks ago after the accord was signed.
10:21:52 COMM: I returned to the port of Nouadhibou. The weather had settled and I joined a pirogue captain Baye Sene on a fishing trip.
10:22:29 It seemed to me that in order to keep Europe’s vast subsidised fishing fleet in business we had persuaded Mauritania to sell its future.
Certainly, the fishermen here feel the one thing they have to offer the global economy has been stolen from them, condemning them to a life of poverty and perpetual danger.
Everyone has a story to tell.
SYNC: Apparently they were sleeping, they were anchored and they were sleeping in the pirogue and a large boat came along and cut the anchor chain.
SYNC: He says after cutting the anchor chain the boat then hit the pirogue and as soon as it realised that it hit the pirogue he says it cut out its lights and disappeared.
SYNC: Apparently he was in the water for 11 hours before he was rescued by another pirogue.
10:22:56 COMM: Soon on the horizon we could see the trawlers hard at work. In Europe we eat a third of the fish caught in the world. Only a tiny fraction come from our own exhausted waters.
10:23:30 Our fishing trip wasn’t a success. We sat for hours but caught nothing. They said it’s been like this since the big boats arrived.
What’s happening to Mauritania’s fishermen is part of the hidden cost of how we lead our lives.