"Pirate fishing boats target Africa"

From the BBC

There is a kind of theft that happens every day in a majority of the world's poor countries - and in many of the richer ones too.
It usually happens out of sight, and most perpetrators get away with it.

The monetary value of this theft is about $15bn per year; the ecological cost can only be guessed at.

Yet many people would turn their noses up if they chanced upon a trove of this treasure.
Because these jewels are fish.

"Those that are fishing illegally, they are paying nothing, so we are losing something from our country", says Mamadou Diallo, programme manager for the environmental group WWF's West Africa office, and a former fisheries officer.

The amount that Africa is losing, if new figures from David Agnew of Imperial College London are right, is about $1bn per year - the cost of licences that illegal fishers should have paid to catch what they are catching.

The ecological cost may, in the long run, be much higher.

"The immediate ecological impact is damage to habitat, because they are using trawls, and trawls are not always good for the ecosystems - they damage habitat for fish," says Dr Diallo.

"The second thing is pollution, because they are discharging at sea, and they can do anything they want."

Precisely how much fish is removed illegally from West African waters is not known - apart from anything else, there is little good data on the state of stocks before the plunder began.

Elsewhere, where ecosystems and commercial fish numbers have been studied for longer, it is clear that illegal fishing can help wreak major damage.

In the Mediterranean Sea, where scientists estimate that illegal catches of bluefin tuna in recent years have almost matched legal catches in weight, changes are afoot...