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This afternoon, an episode of ‘The Documentary Podcast’ was released on the BBC World Service, in which the presenter, Rob Wilson, discusses the dynamics of the international trade and its sometimes complex relationship with organised crime. Over the course of about an hour, Rob takes his listeners with him on a journey from Gloucestershire in England to the Polish border with Kaliningrad, and then to the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean Sea, explaining the particulars of eel fishing and farming, and the obvious difficulties with determining the source and the destination of uncertified fish.
The European component of the story makes for an interesting piece of investigative journalism, and whilst some of the questions are left unanswered, the paper trail Rob and Pavel uncover suggests a meaningful link between eel shipments moving through Poland and the ranching activities currently being supported by Good Fish and the Russian Government in the Vistula and Curonian lagoons. It is not confirmed whether there are established trade routes between Russia, China, and Japan, or indeed whether East Asia is the final destination for the fish grown on in Russia. The report is more interested in the first stage of the trade, to Russia, and the competitive culture it has helped to create, and is more compelling for it. There has been significant unusual and suspicious activity along the Kaliningrad’s European Union border, including eel farms trading in large quantities of tobacco and live eels being stocked into private ponds, which suggests there is more to the picture than policymakers suggest.
Across the Atlantic, the blurred lines between legal and illegal activity reform and reshape themselves in different ways, with the Dominican Republic racing to clamp down on eel-related gang violence on its northern coastline and a largely lawless Haiti cashing in on a high-volume ‘legal’ trade to Asia. Rob describes glass eel fishing as being a relatively new phenomenon on Hispaniola, with a history lasting no less than fifteen years, and argues that overexploitation in North America only became a problem when international trafficking networks decided to look beyond Europe to meet demand. It is now a ‘very dangerous activity’, according to one fishermen, with fights frequently breaking out between licensed, traditional fishermen and the new generation of elvermen tied to these gangs; and there are ‘many documented murder cases across the north due to clashes involving eels’.
Eel fishing is ‘like a stock market’, and in Haiti in particular, the level of fishing activity is directly related to the cost of glass eels in China. This, Rob notes, has exacerbated the pattern of overexploitation, which extends from the glass eel stock to the people involved in fishing it. In a conversation with ‘The Duke’, a spokesperson for a Triad society in Hong Kong, listeners become aware of the challenges associated with supplying the sizeable Chinese and Japanese markets and the vast financial rewards. For his ‘agents’ in source countries like Haiti or Canada, Poland or the UK, there are good sums of money to be made; for him, there is the potential for a fifteen to twenty per cent share of the proceeds, equivalent to $750,000 per month; but eels, he says, are ‘living cocaine, the cocaine of the sea’, and the financial potential is incredible, particularly when the market conditions are right. Asked whether what he is doing is legal or ethical, particularly when an endangered species is involved, he replies as follows,
I haven’t violated the law that much. I have a clear conscience. I don’t make money from women, I don’t make money from drugs, I don’t make money from cheating people, gambling, or making people lose their savings. As for the impact on an endangered species, there is a saying in China that goes “All beings compete for natural selection; if something cannot survive in our environment then they have to be sacrificed so the entire food chain can continue to exist’. I think eventually they will be eliminated. I support conservation in principle but at the same time I believe profit often outweighs the value of protection.