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. “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. At least with illicit lumber operations, Grossmann said, “you don’t have a different shell corporation for every single truck.” The AP review found that most cases of corruption and graft were low-level schemes, like one in India in which prosecutors last year alleged two fisheries officers extorted $1,100 to approve subsidies for a fish farm. “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. 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.