The illegal ships need workers - and they're happy to exploit people as easily as they exploit the oceans, recruiting from low-income nations with poor employment controls and even poorer opportunities. The result of this can be seen on board both the "zombie ships" and working trawlers - like the arrested Lian Run 14 - where Chinese men work in a kind of indentured slavery, often without access to their passports, staying at sea for up to two years at a time.

In the last few weeks we've seen the dangerous, ramshackle conditions of many rusty pirate fishing boats - if any of these ships were to venture north or south - out of the doldrums (the calm area just north of the equator at 4° to 10° north, where the air pressure is low, and the sea calm) - they would surely be swamped by rough seas. Even in the calm conditions of Guinea they can sink - apparently a ship with 14 men on board went down in that area last year.

We spent most of our time in the Exclusive Economic Zone of Guinea, the largest continental shelf area in Atlantic Africa (56,000km2). Guinea has coastline of 320km, and should have a wealth of marine resources.

Yet, West Africa is the only region in the world where fish consumption is falling. There's not enough fish being landed by Guinea to meet the needs of the Guinean population, where 51% of protein consumed in Guinea is fish. Domestic fishing in Guinea is primarily an artisanal activity, employing 10,000 fishermen, working relatively close to the coast in small 6-7m wooden canoes, or pirogues The thing is, according to the Committee for the Eastern Central Atlantic Fisheries (CECAF), the fish stocks of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone are already overexploited - thanks to pirate fishing.

Guinea is reckoned to lose US$110 million worth of fish to theft - Sierra Leone loses about US$29 million, and Liberia US$10 million. CECAF recommend a reduction in fishing in the region - but unless pirate fishing in the region is stopped, this is impossible.

In contrast to Guinean fisherman, foreign industrial trawlers, armed with massive trawl nets, work the coastal zone, targeting octopuses, squid and cuttlefish (cephalopods), shrimp and bottom living (demersal) fish. In Guinea, the licensed demersal fish trawl fishery is estimated to discard 25% of its catch, the cephalopod fishery 27%, and the shrimp fishery 33%.

It's shocking enough to consider such levels of wastage in Guinea, where over a quarter of the population is undernourished. It's even more distressing when you consider the practices of unlicensed pirate trawlers. These have higher bycatch and discard rates that legitimate fishermen, use smaller, illegal mesh sizes, and fish in shallow coastal waters - we've seen trawlers at work in depths of 20-30m.

The fish from these trawlers is transshipped to reefers (refrigerated ships), which take the fish all the way to Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, where the fish is conveniently integrated into the European market - in other words, laundered. The port of Las Palmas in an important facility for the transport of fish, as well as for the servicing and refuelling of both legal and illegal vessels. However, weak port controls mean that there's no reliable way to trace the movement of stolen fish from its point of landing in Las Palmas, to its arrival on our dinner plates. This makes the Spain, and the EU complicit in the murky doings of pirate fishing.

Do you know where your fish comes from?

When you pick up fish in your local supermarket, don't assume that it caught locally by some cheerful ruddy-faced fisherman in a wooly sweater, as he hauled in his nets. When you pop the fish on the grill, take note - this fish could been stolen from the sea thousands of miles away, off the coast of Africa, then smuggled through countless European ports and warehouses until it reaches your local shop.

- Dave

Read more: EJF: Impacts at Sea and On Land »
Pirate fishing: stolen fish, stolen futures »
EJF: Party to the Plunder »
Frightening Facts about Overfishing and Pirate Fishing »

Extra bit:
A couple of days ago, Aftonbladet newspaper in Sweden published story about how far fish fingers need to travel 44,000km between being caught and being eaten. Norwegian cod are shipped from the far north of the Atlantic, all the way down to the Mediterranean, out to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal, around Southeast Asia, and finally up to Qingdao in Northern China. The cod is filleted... then shipped all the way back to Europe. Consumers never find out that their fish fingers travel so far - the box makes no mention of China. Insane, eh?
Aftonbladet: Fiskpinnen reser över 4 400 mil (in Swedish)
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Stolen Fish Slideshow

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