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Karakia hi tuna, hi ika hoki
To the thousands of nameless people who brave the seas to
feed us,
to their families who anxiously await their return,
and to those who grieve for the ones who never come home.
Taku aho nei, ka tangi wiwini.
Taku aho nei, ka tangi wawana.
Taku aho nei, ka hinga, ka mate ra.
Kai mai, kai mai, e te kōkopu,
Ki taku nei mōunu nei.
Tara wiwini, tara wawana,
.d Kia ai he whakataunga mau
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Prayer used in catching eels or fish
My fishing line here, its cry is awesome.
My fishing line here, its cry is dreadful.
My fishing line here, it is dropped, it sinks there.
Bite here, bite here, O you kōkopu,
Bite here at my bait.
Awesome point, dreadful point,
That allows you to be landed
By the sharp point, by the hook.
Awesome point, dreadful point,
Which will deceive at Wai-korire.
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gir llA A definition of modern slavery
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rP A person is forced to work, held through fraud, under
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or she cannot walk away from their job without dire
consequences to them or their families.
‘I was a slave, but then I became useless to the Koreans
so they sent me home with nothing’
– Ruslan, an Indonesian crewman
on fishing boat Melilla 203
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Preface
I felt peckish. It had been a long ride in a car with a decidedly
surly driver and little to eat. Now there was time to kill before
my flight. The food hall at Indira Gandhi International Airport
in New Delhi offered the full range of Indian fast foods but
they were a bit hefty for the occasion. I wanted something
light. The ubiquitous McDonald’s offered Filet-O-Fish. It
would fit the bill in the ten minutes before the Mumbai flight
boarded.
My selection was not unusual: fish makes up nearly 16
percent of the total human intake of animal protein. On
average, every person on the planet eats 17 kilograms of fish
a year. Globally, fish provides more than one and a half
billion people with almost 20 percent of their average per
capita intake of animal protein, and three billion people with
at least 15 percent. In short, fishing is mighty important to the
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human race.
Modern-day fishing in the oceans is like Buffalo Bill blasting
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ser sth endless but is in fact diminishing towards the point of
gir llA extinction for many key species. Over 140 million tonnes of
.sse fish are taken each year, of which around 115 million tonnes
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The supply chain that had delivered the fish for my Filet-O-
Fish to an airport in India was long and convoluted. Few
McDonald’s customers, having a snack while waiting for a
flight, could hope to know (if they were even interested) who
had caught the fish, much less how it had been processed. It is
also highly unlikely they would know anything about the
species or whether the fish had been sustainably harvested, so
it would be impossible for them to make an ethical or
considered choice. All of us would be entirely dependent on
the moral considerations, if any, that McDonald’s may have
taken account of.
The fine print on the box said the fish was hoki. The fish’s
Latin name, Macruronus novaezelandiae, was not included,
but had it been it would have revealed the fish’s origins. This
barely known species of fish, processed and sold in vast
quantities around the world, is, as this book will show, hauled
out of cold waters off New Zealand’s South Island,
sometimes by underpaid or barely paid men from poor areas
of Asia.
Wild fishing is labour-intensive. Everything on a vessel, from
shooting the net to processing the fish and packing it, requires
human hands. After a fish hits the pound below the trawling
deck, lines of men quickly cut off its head and tail, gut the
.de rest, pack and snap-freeze it. These men may have been on
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r sthg They will be cold and wet. Some will be seasick, and all will
ir llA .sse be tired and sore. Their workplace will be crowded and noisy;
rP depending on the seas, it will also move violently and without
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They will also be expected to paint and maintain the boat, not
an easy job for it will probably be an ageing rust bucket.
Their meals may consist of damaged hoki. On some fishing
boats even fresh damaged fish will be a luxury. In 2013 in
Whangarei I came across Spanish fishing boats whose
Indonesian crew had been fed ‘bait fish’ – frozen mackerel
and squid – for 60 days straight. Meanwhile, the officers on
the boat had been eating wholesome Spanish meals.
At some point the frozen hoki will be shipped to China, South
Korea or Thailand. There it will be semi-thawed so that
further cheap labour can cut it down into fillets – or
cellphone-sized pieces to stick inside buns. No longer really
fish at that point, it has become the end point of a supply
chain that often relies, for its economic viability, on paying
workers as little as possible, and sometimes nothing at all.
Then there is the other question: has the hoki been caught
sustainably? Or is it destined to go the way of many other fish
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species?
A couple of months later, I attend a family celebration at an
eye-wateringly expensive Japanese restaurant in Auckland.
.de The restaurant’s set menu is designed to make pescetarians
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r sth Antarctic toothfish from the Ross Sea. Eating Antarctic
g
ir llA toothfish, one of the most expensive fish sold anywhere, is the
.sserP maritime equivalent of eating tiger. This is a fish that no one
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