The illegal trade in black caviar

this was a most fascinating and detailed study of how the trade in caviar works in the grey/black market. And because we in Europe are the main consumer, we are actively encouraging the devastation of the species. So whilst the common user of caviar will be shocked at the destruction of the rhino or the elephant for their horns/tusks, they are willing to keep on eating this very expensive fish roe. Sad...

The trade in caviar has a rich and colorful history, influenced over thousands of years by many cultures, societies and in the last decades by regulation. The value of caviar is historically discovered in the context of social change, political relationships and environmental change. The role of organized crime is described, as the scarcity of caviar has offered the unique opportunity to fish illegally, smuggle and trade contraband to mainly European countries with millions in profits. This study highlights that these criminal networks manifest themselves at all levels of the trade: from the poaching areas where organized criminal groups cooperate with law enforcers and possess top-notch equipment to major smuggling operations in the hands of sophisticated criminal networks. Although due to overexploitation ‘wild caviar’ is increasingly difficult to obtain, the demand in the context of exclusivity and scarcity remains intact by the upper class society desire for edible gold.

Book Review: the story of sushi

so whilst I was pottering around a bookstore in Singapore, I noticed this book and snaffled it. Its called as the Story of Sushi written by Trevor Corson. It is one of the most extraordinary foodie books I have ever read. Its a non-fiction book so I can give away the plot. Its about Sushi :).

it follows a group of trainee Sushi Chefs who are getting trained on a sushi course in a Japanese restaurant in USA. Very personalised and I loved it. Week by week, the author takes us through how the trainees learn how to do Sushi. In each chapter, he delves into the history of sushi, the history of each of the fish, the anatomy – bio chemistry – bio engineering of all the fish. How to prepare them, how different chefs did sushi, how to make nigiri and and and.

Seriously recommended for anybody who likes sushi, buy this. If you like making sushi, then I am not sure how much this will be of use. I like making sushi for the kids and I love cooking as well, but the level at which these chefs operate, the knowledge you need, the practise you need to have, is at a level that I can never achieve. Will require just way too much investment in time, energy and money that I can devote. So all I can do is to try to do some basics. I will never be able to get the quality of tuna, salmon, etc. etc. that you require. I might be able to make the rice rectangles (right now, they end up looking like demented torpedoes).

the author talks about rice, the religion of sushi – the idea that every grain of rice has a deity inside, it talks about how to carve radishes and cucumbers. How the sushi chef is more a counsellor than a chef. How to order sushi at a restaurant. How and when to use chop sticks. Where is the fatty portion on a tuna. How to distinguish between fast twitch and slow twitch muscle in a fish and how they taste. He talks about unami, the 5th sense.

Seriously, I loved this book. Anybody, as i mentioned, anybody who likes sushi, should have a copy of this book. And you can also use this book, but forget being a sushi master…that’s at a level where gods roam, not for mortals like me.

oh! he also talks about knives and the discipline to keep your cooking station clean. How to avoid waste. sighs, this is a real foodie book, comes highly recommended.

End of the day

1. Dont dip your rice into the soy sauce

2. dont use chopsticks to eat sushi, use fingers

3. dont put wasabi in the soy sauce

4. the pickled ginger is meant as a mouth cleanser between courses

The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century

Kids

Here's a sad story. I'm sure you remember the book moby dick? 

Whaling. Diya do you remember the big whales we saw at the natural history museum? They are near extinction. 

Another amazing story of how these whales were simply killed so that a blunt production target from a centrally planned economy can be achieved. No reason. Not much use. Just killing. 

And we are doing the same thing with other species. And before somebody thinks that vegetarians are better, they are equally culpable as they demand the same feedstock and pulses and grains. Thereby reducing biodiversity. 

There is some hope but the ocean wealth is tragically being robbed. We will not have the same planet in few decades if we keep on consuming at this destructive levels. And we are still killing whales at an awesome rate. 

I saw whales in Hawaii, kids, They are majestic. They move with a dignity that's awesome. And their eyes are full of intelligence. Their cranial capacity is huge. Amazing creatures. 

Love

Baba

The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century
http://www.psmag.com/environment/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774/

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In the fall of 1946,  a 508-foot ship steamed out of the port of Odessa, Ukraine. In a previous life she was called the Wikinger (“Viking”) and sailed under the German flag, but she had been appropriated by the Soviet Union after the war and renamed the Slava (“Glory”). The Slava was a factory ship, crewed and equipped to separate one whale every 30 minutes into its useful elements, destined for oil, canned meat and liver, and bone meal. Sailing with her was a retinue of smaller, nimbler catcher vessels, their purpose betrayed by the harpoon guns mounted atop each clipper bow. They were bound for the whaling grounds off the coast of Antarctica. It was the first time Soviet whalers had ventured so far south.

The work began inauspiciously. In her first season, the Slava caught just 386 whales. But by the fifth—before which the fleet’s crew wrote a letter to Stalin pledging to bring home more than 500 tons of whale oil—the Slava’s annual catch was approaching 2,000. The next year it was 3,000. Then, in 1957, the ship’s crew discovered dense conglomerations of humpback whales to the north, off the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. There were so many of them, packed so close together, the Slava’s helicopter pilots joked that they could make an emergency landing on the animals’ backs.

In November 1959, the Slava was joined by a new fleet led by the Sovetskaya Ukraina, the largest whaling factory ship the world had ever seen. By now the harpooners—talented marksmen whose work demanded the dead-eyed calm of a sniper—were killing whales faster than the factory ships could process them. Sometimes the carcasses would drift alongside the ships until the meat spoiled, and the flensers would simply strip them of the blubber—a whaler on another fleet likened the process to peeling a banana—and heave the rest back into the sea.

The Soviet fleets killed almost 13,000 humpback whales in the 1959-60 season and nearly as many the next, when the Slava and Sovetskaya Ukraina were joined by a third factory ship, the Yuriy Dolgorukiy. It was grueling work: One former whaler, writing years later in a Moscow newspaper, claimed that five or six Soviet crewmen died on the Southern Hemisphere expeditions each year, and that a comparable number went mad. A scientist working aboard a factory ship in the Antarctic on a later voyage described seeing a deckhand lose his footing on a blubber-slicked deck and catch his legs in a coil of whale intestine as it slid overboard. By the time his mates were able to retrieve him from the water he had succumbed to hypothermia. He was buried at sea, lowered into the water with a pair of harpoons to weight down his body.

The Gloucester Fish War

The problem with overfishing is an increasing one Son. This is a classic example of the 'tragedy of the commons'. When everybody owns something then nobody wants to take care of it. Same goes for govt property. You take care of your stuff but we aren't that careful with public property. The sea is open and thus overfishing happens. This is going to be a very big issue as a significant part of the world and most coastal countries rely on sea fish and food for protein. When fisheries collapse, it takes a very long time to recover if at all. Whole species can disappear. One of the few cases where government intervention is required if nothing else to protect what cannot protect itself. 

Love

Baba

The Gloucester Fish War - BusinessWeek
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/the-gloucester-fish-war-11222011.html

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How a small town in Massachusetts destroyed a decade of law enforcement

By Brendan Borrell

The bidding starts early at the seafood auction in Gloucester, Mass. Each day about 30 tons of fish—mostly cod, haddock, and flounder—come in by boat on Cape Ann, a fist jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. Fishermen motor up to the concrete docks behind the beige-and-white warehouse, then wait while workers in rubber boots hoist their catches and weigh them out on a stainless-steel digital scale. At 4 a.m. grocery store buyers, restaurant owners, and distributors file in to inspect and bid on the haul.

The traders and graders were wrapping up their business just after 9 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2006, when 16 federal agents in Crown Victorias and Ford Expeditions pulled into the parking lot. They entered the building in pairs. Although most of them worked for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they wore bulletproof vests and carried Glock pistols, according to interviews with participants and the NOAA investigative report.

They were looking for the auction’s founder and chief executive officer, a mustached man named Larry Ciulla. When they found him in an office off the auction floor, they officially informed him of their search warrant. They suspected he had illegally bought and sold cod, one of the world’s most valuable, most threatened, and closely watched stocks of fish. The agents were there to seize the auction’s last three years of records and had rented a U-Haul for the mountain of evidence they intended to truck away. In raiding the Gloucester Seafood Display Auction, the largest fish dealer on the Gulf of Maine, which extends from Cape Cod up to the southern tip of Nova Scotia, they hoped to send a message to the fishermen of Gloucester: Overfishing doesn’t pay.

Designed for failure: A critique of the Common Fisheries Policy of the European Union

You might wonder why a banker is talking about fish? Well, there are many reasons, not least that I am a Bengali and fish is in my blood or fishy blood or bloody fish, but anyway, you get what I mean. Fish is integral to my culture :). But that’s the jokey reason, i am interested in fish because it is a crucial part of the world’s economic, political and environmental system. If you do not manage your fish stocks properly, you WILL get into trouble because unemployment in a vital sector will plunge, nutrition across the wider population will be impacted, the upstream and downstream impacts of lack of fish is huge, and so on and so forth. Being in a bank unfortunately guarantees that every problem will ultimately impact the banking system in some shape or form. Whether its to do with corporate funding, interest rates, bankruptcies, you name it, a bank has to handle it.

One would have expected that a supranational body like the EU, which was original designed for making sure that the Coal and Steel production in the core European Union countries was coordinated, could have handled something like the fish stocks in the EU? After all, the Europeans have been fishing for thousands of years, much longer than they have been making steel. But no. This paper bluntly puts in clear terms, the reasons why the European Union has spectacularly failed in managing its fish stocks via the Common Fisheries Policy and has inexorably lead to overfishing, massive unemployment in so many fishing communities around Europe, huge subsidy bills and basically screwed up the sea environment. So what were the issues?

1. Biological Issues: Every year, the scientists propose a sustainable level of fish stocks based upon a rather clear mathematical model based upon unexploited stock size, the maximum economic yield, the maximum sustainable yield and a precautionary lower biomass limit. Based upon this model, you know how much fish to catch. There are other factors such as when do juvenile fish become adults and start spawning, how many times do you want the fish to spawn before being caught, etc. Guess what? the European Commission and the Council of Ministers usually agree a limit circa 50% higher than what the scientists propose. Hmmm, that really helps guys.

2. Economic Issues: Fish stocks suffer from the problem of common goods, everybody owns fish and nobody owns them at the same time. Its like common pasture grounds where everybody can graze their cows but nobody has to take responsibility for the pasture. So individual motivation is to overfish and thus have overcapacity. If you provide fishing quotas to fishermen, which is comparatively economically efficient (even if you consider the 50% over permissioning from above), it still doesnt work efficiently as monopolies can form, quotas dont really address the issue of the catch size itself and finally this doesnt apply to fishermen from outside the political structure. Not much can be done about Japanese fishermen fishing off the economic zones in Europe, can you? And who will validate once the fishing boat lands up in a Japanese port? not the EU authorities anyway. In the EU’s case, subsidies have been given for developing boats, subsidising fuel, and so on and so forth. Totally distorted economic market in Europe.

3. Legal Issues: You have to have ONE regulatory / legal body to handle issues such as this. But no, the whole panoply of rules, regulations, decrees, courts, councils, and and and is just complex, non transparent, riddled with inefficiencies, cannot enforce suitably, and so on and so forth.

4. Political Issues: The fisheries ministers in the respective EU nations are not judged on the basis of how well they manage fish stocks on an European wide basis but on how much quota they manage to get for their own constituents. There is no minister representing the poor fish, see? So everybody goes about raping the fish and devil take the hindmost. Also because this is a slow decline, politicians do not take responsibility as they will be long gone by the time the populations actually collapse. Due to different election timelines, there is no consistent policy making either. Consequently, the European Fisheries policy frequently reduces to the lowest common denominator.

These are just few of the issues that we are facing. Looking at how the EU actually handled something that was huge and crucial such as the Bosnian Crisis, the Kosovo Crisis or even the Greek Debt Crisis, I am not sanguine how it will handle a situation like this with the fish stocks, but still, some attempts need to be made to address this problem from a multi disciplinary perspective.

More evidence of incompetence in European Foreign Policy

While the details are not that important, this issue again leads one to wonder what kind of termite brains are working in the European Commission and in the various other Foreign Ministries around the globe. Did they not KNOW the Balkans? What morons!

Read and weep. I quote:

In their statement, the ministers urged Croatia not to enforce a 57,000 sq km fisheries protection zone in the Adriatic sea that it proclaimed on January 1 against the wishes of neighbouring Italy and Slovenia.
Croatia has so far taken no steps to enforce the fishery zone. However, whereas Zagreb describes the zone as necessary to curb uncontrolled fishing in the Adriatic, mainly by Italians, Slovenia sees it partly as an attempt to influence the outcome of border disputes that erupted between them after Yugoslavia’s collapse in 1991.
Seen from Croatia’s point of view, Slovenia is exploiting its EU presidency to slow down Zagreb’s EU talks and to make it yield on the fisheries zone issue.
For some older EU member states, the problem goes deeper. They feel torn between the desire to show solidarity with Slovenia and the need not to antagonise Croatia, whose entry is an important plank of the EU’s long-term goal of prosperity and peace in the Balkans.
The dispute has complicated Croatia’s efforts to become the EU’s 28th member state. Croatia started its accession talks in October 2005 but about half of the 33 negotiating chapters, or policy areas, have yet to be opened. No chapters were closed last year.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Fish in the sea - the law of unintented consequences

When there is a limited resource such as fish and more demand, with price pressures, the resource will get diminished rapidly. Given that scenario, governments try to step in. And invariably cock it up. Look at the situation with fishing in the north sea. So you put in limits to how much cod you can catch. So in 2 days of fishing, you catch your quota. After that, if you catch any cod, you have to throw it back into the sea, dead and rotting. Multiply this with hundreds of boats. People recognise that the situation is bad. But because of the stupidities of the European Union, there is no solution. Nobody is responsible and at the end of the line, their collective political mismanagement will lead to fishstocks collapsing as we saw with Newfoundland.

EU commissioner Joe Borg acknowledges the problem but sees no clear solution. sighs, no solution? stop fishing, you blithering git. Give alternative training to the fishermen, stop fishing for 25-30 years, TODAY!.

Read and pity the European bureacrats and politicians for not having brains.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

The Fisheries policy of the EU sucks!

Well, I can be blunt about it. This is yet another example of how and why's of the disgusting way the EU makes public policy. Europe's impact analysis is not good at all, to put it bluntly as I did here.

And now the FT is reporting that:

Europe’s fishing policy is “poor”, with its waters among the most over-fished and the industry among the least profitable in the world, according to an internal European Commission study.

The report by outside experts, obtained by the Financial Times, says overcapacity, failure to stand up to special interests and a “command and control” system in Brussels have left fish stocks in many areas on the brink of collapse.

“The fisheries subject to the common fisheries policy suffer a much higher rate of over-fishing than occurs on average worldwide,” says the report, prepared by a US and European expert. About 80 per cent of EU stocks are over-fished, compared with 25 per cent worldwide.

Again, my question is, who was incompetent enough to let this happen and why is it still happening? We want a better manager than the current lot. I like my fish and chips, but if we let our fisheries be managed by those bunch of hoo-haa's in Brussels, then very soon I will be eating tofu carved into fish rather than fish itself!

Technorati Tags: European Commission , Fishing