Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Environmentalist vs. fishing companies

Environmentalist has a constant fight again the indiscriminate and illegal fishing practicing by unscrupulous fishermen who are finishing and destroying the natural resources of the sea.
The great demand for food has caused the growth of new and large companies of food. Most of them do not care about the consequences of their actions. The fishing companies are one the most dangerous of them, the fishing of shark and tuna fish are very harmful to marine life. When they want to fish tuna they set their nets and most of the time dolphins and sharks are caught and they are not released to the ocean. The fishermen kill them and sell them to the black market.
In Asia, countries like Japan and China use the fin of sharks as aphrodisiacs, other animals like seals are killing and castrated for the same purpose. The whale hunting is one of the most unconscious and destructive act of men, this species are endangered.
Institutions like Green Peace are doing an extraordinary work protecting species like dolphins, sharks and whales whose population are decrease. The work of this institution is really extraordinary; they are working around the world and putting under pressure to countries like Japan. In the last decade they got that countries like Australia ruled the activities of the Japanese whaling fleet, and ordered it to halt its operations in the Australian whale sanctuary. In the same way Greenpeace has succeeded in reduce the fishing with enormous nets and they captured hundreds of Km of illegal driftnets in the Mediterranean.
Similar institutions have dedicated their work to protect the eco-system, because the damage due to the bad practices of these fishing companies had affected other species like shrimp and crabs, because they do not respect the closed seasons. Other marine species such as sea cucumber which are distributed in all oceans are very common in southwest ocean Pacific and Indian oceans, the populations of these animals decreased drastically from the Ecuadorian coast in the last decade due to overexploitation and are now being taking in Galapagos Island, with the consequence decline of populations. This is as result of overfishing and illegal fishing.
Unfortunately for the control of the destruction of certain species there are not institutions that protect them. The most of time the economy of these institutions are not enough to do their mission, because they need a lot of money to get the logistic (people,boats,food, electronics devices) which are necessary to sail around the oceans looking for those fishing ships. In the same way they need the support of countries and their authorities to achieve their mission.

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