Trawlermen fire potatoes at Greenpeace activists
Greenpeace said fishermen fired potatoes at the group’s activists today when they used inflatable boats to disrupt a trawling ship near New Zealand in a protest timed to coincide with UN talks on managing the world’s oceans.
The activists delayed the trawler Ocean Reward in the Tasman Sea for about an hour by attaching a life raft to its net, Greenpeace campaigner Carmen Gravatt said from aboard the protest vessel Rainbow Warrior.
The trawler’s crew turned a high-pressure water hose on the activists and “used a compressed air gun to shoot potatoes at us”, she said, adding that nobody “was hit by any of the stuff they threw at us”.
Talley’s Fisheries, the New Zealand operator of Ocean Reward, was not immediately available for comment.
Greenpeace is campaigning to halt bottom-trawl fishing around the globe, saying it is more destructive of ocean floor life than any other style of fish harvest.
The sixth meeting of UN informal consultations on Oceans and the Law of the Sea – which opened yesterday in New York and was to run until Friday – was expected to discuss the demand for a UN moratorium on high seas bottom trawling, Gravatt said.
Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Chile and Costa Rica support the call.
Gravatt said the protest ship would stay near the trawler and observe as it drags its net across the ocean floor between Australia and New Zealand – 350 miles west of New Zealand’s North Island.
She said that the nets, attached to chains or rollers, destroyed everything in the their path including coral forests, sponges, worm tubes, mussels, boulder fields, and rocky reefs.
“Huge numbers of non-target fish and other deep sea creatures are unintentionally caught as well. Then they are dumped,” she said in a statement. “A global moratorium on bottom trawling in international waters is urgently needed to protect life in the deep sea.”
