Russia Buys Up the Supertrawlers, or The Origins of the World Trawler Wars

Sergei Vakhrin, editor–in–chief, Severnaia Patsifika

At the very beginning of the twentieth century Russian fishermen attempted to use a steam–powered trawler for fishing in coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean, but the opinion of the commission evaluating the results of this experiment was discouraging for those who initiated the new idea – the market quality of trawler–caught fish turned out to be exceptionally poor. This was understandable – at that time, the fish were so plentiful that they simply crushed each other as they filled the trawl.

But with different times come different ways.

The first trawlers appeared in the Russian Far East in the 1920s, after the establishment of Soviet power in these regions. But they did not immediately take root. For a long time they were used for other purposes, such as cargo ships to transport salt herring and salmon caught in drift or set nets or by purse seining. Even cod was harvested singly by hook and line at the time, since Russia still recalled the days when product quality was a commodity producer’s first concern, and concepts like “the plan” or “gross product” had not as yet penetrated Russian psychology and consciousness.

But with the end of the so–called NEP period (New Economic Plan), just when it appeared that Bolsheviks and capitalists had found possibilities for coexistence, that very well–known period began when Soviet Man arose to take on the mass of plans and achievements which would lead him toward Communism.

The fishing sector of the Soviet Union did not digress from this course. But as long as salmon and herring remained plentiful, the entire fishing effort was concentrated on these species, initially harvesting thousands then millions of tsentners, racing to set new records, and throwing away fully half of what was caught, back into the sea since fishing capacities were not coordinated with abilities to process what was caught.

Thus, major development of the Russian trawl industry began only after the end of World War II. In the 1950s, when overfulfillment of plan indicators and socialist obligations led to destruction of the salmon stocks, a powerful industrialized fishing fleet of mid–sized trawlers reached the Russian Far East via the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic Ocean, equipped with refrigeration plants and freezer holds. This fleet could work autonomously – independently processing the catch and transferring the finished product to freighters for transshipment In this way a new epoch in the history of fishing in Russia began, an epoch of active coastal and then distant water fisheries, in which fishing vessels operated in the farthest reaches of the world oceans.

This epoch began and continued with terrible ecological shocks; it’s true these had no direct relation to the destruction of the salmon population, but to the remainder …

In the 1950s the combined trawl fleets of Kamchatka, Sakhalin and Primorye devastated the herring, cod and flounder stocks in the Sea of Okhotsk, then in the 1960s, those of the Bering Sea, too – initially, their own stocks on the Russian shelf. But in 1958 they started fishing for rockfish in Bristol Bay, then flounder in the Gulf of Alaska, went on to wipe out the pristipoma stocks in Hawaii, and later heaped California beaches with dead hake, after setting trawls outside the three–mile zone then throwing overboard whatever they couldn’t process into fish meal.

In the early 1960s mid–sized trawlers were replaced by BMRTs (Large Refrigerator Fishing Trawlers). From that time distance no longer placed limits on dreams – fishing vessels from the Soviet Far East ranged from the shores of South America to the Antarctic ice, from the Indian Ocean to the coasts of Africa.

The first BMRT harvested 60 thousand tsentners a year in 1962. By 1963 that record had been broken – 110 thousand tsentners.

In 1964, BMRT Nikolai Ostrovskii set a record for the most fish caught in the entire Soviet Union – 150 thousand tons [sic: tsentners?] of fish, although not a word appeared in the Soviet press explaining that of all that fish, none was turned into edible seafood products, but into fish meal to be used as fertilizer on the collective and state farms of the Soviet countryside.

In 1965 (when they stopped counting in tsentners), a catch of 13 thousand earned the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, which is the highest award for labor in the Soviet Union, short only perhaps of a kiss from an aging General Secretary.

By the mid–1970s three–fourths of all the fish caught by Soviet fishing vessels came from outside the territorial waters of the U.S.S.R., from the economic zones of other countries which at that time had not yet been established as such and thus were fished out mercilessly.

The implementation of territorial economic zones from 1976 to 1978 constituted a tragedy for the Soviet fishing industry as the richest fishing areas were suddenly closed down. Fishermen of the Far Eastern fleet survived this tragedy better than the rest of the Soviet fishing industry: they discovered that their own Sea of Okhotsk and Bering Sea were teeming with pollock – pollock, which in better times no one in the Soviet Union even considered a real fish, referring to it by disdainful nicknames as a junk fish, hardly worth processing into fish meal.

But pollock saved Russia’s large–capacity fishing fleet. If one day they build a monument in our country to fish, it will probably be dedicated to herring for saving our people in the post–war famine years (and then in thanks was wiped out by those same people), but also to pollock, which they have not yet managed to destroy, despite openly and purposefully working toward this since the late 1970s.

The total pollock catch reached its apogee in 1988 at seven million tons, four million of which came from the Bering Sea. The main thing that helped Russian trawlers increase their catch was expansion into neutral waters of the Bering Sea and scientific approval to fish for American pollock feeding in Russian waters. An unspoken order was handed down – show no mercy to American pollock stocks – and catch levels shot up, until they plummeted just as rapidly, when the pollock finally could no longer withstand the onslaught of Russian fishing and surrendered to the mercy of the victors. But no mercy was granted – and in 1994, a new article was added to the Russian Far East Fishing Regulations permitting fishing (plundering) for American pollock without respect to commercial size restrictions – that is, to shovel up anything that moved, be it adult or juvenile.

By 1991, the Bering Sea accounted for 36 percent of the world pollock catch, or more than 50 million tons in all (half a billion tsentners, if you count in old terms). Strangely, the Sea of Okhotsk provided only 27 per cent (by this time the catch there was only 25.3 million tons, although it was more valuable, spawning or caviar fish). In its best times the Gulf of Alaska yielded 300 thousand tons a year (only 1.6 percent compared with other areas, but the total catch since the 1960s equals 2.3 million tons).

Of course it would be interesting to know what percent of the total Bering Sea catch comes from American pollock. And it’s curious indeed: in 1988, when the national record was set (4 million tons in the Bering Sea as you may recall), 3.6 million tons, or more than 90 percent, were American pollock. So just who are we stealing from by killing off American pollock as if it’s not ours, but practically some foreign enemy. It’s precisely these, American, pollock that have kept our domestic large–capacity trawler fleet alive and growing for the past twenty years. Think about it.

And now I’ll repeat once again – we show our gratitude for this by wiping out the American pollock without a twinge of conscience. We put it up for grabs to our own and others, remove all protective limits on the fishery, allow the taking of juvenile fish – juveniles, which would return to these fishermen a few years hence as mature fish with full commercial value. No – we’re better off killing them now than letting them slip away into the Americans’ nets. That was the scientific recommendation of the leading Russian and Pacific Ocean fisheries institutes (VNIRO and TINRO). Now what kind of dense minds would recommend doing such a thing to the poor pollock. Or take advantage of them for their own orders…

In the central Bering Sea, that is the “donut hole” itself, regarding which Russia, U.S.A., Poland, China, Japan and South Korea signed an international agreement protecting the Bering Sea pollock, in the best times, only half a million tons were caught, but even this was enough to disrupt the ecological equilibrium. While here we catch ten times that amount and no one even questions it. No one’s threatening to sue us in any international court. The Americans themselves (I mean everyday citizens) have no idea it’s their pollock they’re sharing with us, their pollock that feeds, clothes and houses us.

Nor do they realize that when the Polish, Chinese and Korean ships were expelled from the Bering Sea “donut hole,” with Russia’s blessing they found asylum in that very same Bering Sea, still fishing for American pollock.

But that’s not all.

As blasphemous as it sounds, Russian large–capacity refrigerator trawlers and supertrawlers, as well as Polish, Chinese and South Korean ships, are equipped to process this juvenile pollock. At least it goes into fish meal and not overboard.

But not long ago, in 1991-1994, the Vladivostok office of the trawl and refrigerator fleet (whose executive director is now on the run because of all his shady affairs) acquired twelve Spanish–built supertrawlers from the well–known American Seafoods Company as bare–boat charters, that is long–term lease with subsequent purchase, with the blessing of the very same Fisheries Committee which “edited” the articles of the Fishing Regulations. But since these vessels lack the necessary equipment to process undersize fish, the Fisheries Committee has permitted them to dispose of them – that is, these very same juvenile pollock – by throwing them overboard, and not only in the unfortunate Bering Sea, but in the Sea of Okhotsk as well. For the time being, for all intents and purposes, these are Russian ships.

Very little is known in Russia about these monstrosities, now legally empowered to destroy the Bering and Okhotsk pollock population. They appeared during the years when glasnost was something people only made speeches about, and Russia’s rampant fishing activities were still a prohibited topic, although it was already secret. In short, their arrival went as unnoticed as their continued pursuit of the work for which they were invented – the annihilation of the national resources of Russia and the U.S.A.

Fishermen in the Russian Far East are indignant, but Moscow could care less. In all likelihood, as things are done here, someone gave a good green greasing to someone’s palm, that is, passed a bribe in uncontrolled, uninflated, non–devalued U.S. dollars.

This, then, is the new trend in the development of Russia’s fishing trawler industry – to buy up the monsters that can’t find anywhere else on the entire planet to fish. And to deploy these monsters where Russia, as during the Cold War, is simply compelled according to orders from ABOVE to shoot–to–kill the accursed (emphasis on the first syllable) American pollock population.

For now, it’s American Monarch. Then it’s the rest of the American Seafoods ships which according to new legislation will no longer be permitted to operate in U.S. fishing zones.

And what offense, you might ask, have these poor little boats committed against the Americans? Only their unbelievable gluttony, and it’s not just stuffing their mouths so full that a few crumbs fall out, all very ecological as the Americans have counted and assured us. These ships dump as much fish overboard as another entire American commercial fishing fleet could catch. Their trawls drag up every living thing in their path, from the ocean floor and the water – leaf through the journal “Greenpeace” and you will see countless photographic indictments of these monsters fertilizing the ocean with their industrial waste, when everything flies overboard that doesn’t make it through the Baader fillet lines.

These are the ships that will constitute the new generation of Russian supertrawlers. Watch out, now, America!

And when the Americans close down their fishing zone to the entire supertrawler fleet, and not just those from other countries, why, we’ll find a way to put them to work in the Bering Sea, too.

The Russian fleet’s Polish and Ukrainian–built supertrawlers are pretty well worn out, physically and morally. This affects the fleets of Kamchatka (AO Okeanrybflot), Primorye (Nakhodka Ocean Fisheries Base), and Sakhalin (Korsakov Ocean Fisheries Base). Not one of these is presently capable of acquiring a new fleet on their own. All are on the verge of bankruptcy and in debt up to their ears. So naturally, they will grab at any opportunity to renew their fleet by any means.

We needn’t go far to find examples. This has already happened with the Starcoder trawlers, which came to the Far East as bareboat–charters. This is a particular case which we definitely must stop and consider separately in order to get a realistic picture of the consequences to Russia and Russian fishermen when we stick our dumb heads into the promissory yoke, which in effect is what a bareboat–charter is.

So what happened? Here’s what: our fishermen were suckered in (it goes without saying, not without help from the Fisheries Committee). Here, they say, wanna cooky? Nice new supermodern ships to rent with the option to buy after ten years? Our fishermen couldn’t have stuck their heads in the yoke more joyfully. Then it turned out that they’d be paying more for these ships than they were worth, and had to catch enough fish to pay for them, more fish than there is in the sea. Now everything the fishermen catch goes to paying off their debt, but the debt doesn’t grow any smaller (the interest keeps increasing!). The fishing quotas are shrinking, not growing. The result is that these ships are being arrested by the droves in one or another foreign port for nonpayment of debts, and the fishermen are left with no ship, no money and no fish.

As we all know, bad examples teach us nothing and it will be a similar story with the supertrawlers – our fishermen will be bought out for nothing. And as it goes with us, you pay twice as much for anything you get for free. The only way to pay is with American pollock (the quota in the Sea of Okhotsk has already been reduced nearly in half). That’s how things go in this world, and aided by American supertrawlers, it’s now entirely possible that we’ll be done with this misfortunate tribe of pollock, and no one will even remember the name of the poor fish which drove Russian fishermen wild for the past twenty years.

What’s next once this new epoch ends in the same old way – when, having wiped out the herring, rockfish and pristipoma, we destroy the pollock, too?

The war will resume for ownership of new resources. The most foresighted have already begun military actions – there’s Dalmoreprodukt, the American Monarch’s current owner, beating down the road to Angola… It’s estimated there are on the order of five million tons of fish and fish products in the high seas and territorial waters of various countries ready to offer fishing rights to Russia. Although it’s true these are clear on the other side of world, a long way away from the Russian Far East.

But we don’t learn anything from the past. We keep walking around the earth, it seems, and stepping on the same rake that’s whacked us on the forehead so many times before. But you can envy us our foreheads – there’s nothing that can get through them, certainly not a little old rake …

So, on to the last and final assault on the American pollock – after’em, troops: forward, charge!

Back