- Podcast host Mike G. speaks with Mongabay reporters who conducted recent investigations revealing a major and illegal shark finning operation by one of China’s largest fishing fleets, and the involvement of a major Japanese company, Mitsubishi, in buying that fleet’s products.
- Through an exhaustive interview process with deckhands who worked throughout the company’s fleet, the team showed that Dalian Ocean Fishing deliberately used banned gear to target sharks across a huge swath of the western Pacific Ocean.
- The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission is currently meeting to discuss policies that would crack down even further on use of this gear, and we speak with Phil Jacobson who is there covering the event.
- We also speak with Japan-based reporter Annelise Giseburt who was able to verify that the illegal operation benefited greatly from selling a massive share of its tuna catch to the Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi.
A major investigative report recently published by Mongabay uncovered a massive, clandestine and illegal shark finning operation across the fleet of one of China’s biggest tuna fishing companies.
Listen here:
We speak with Mongabay’s senior editor for Southeast Asia, Philip Jacobson, who conducted the investigation together with Basten Gokkon, a senior Indonesia staff writer for Mongabay. Jacobson details how he and Gokkon can now reveal that the Dalian Ocean Fishing (DOF) company was using banned fishing gear to deliberately catch sharks in international waters on such a massive scale that the shark catch for the entire country of China may have been undercounted for years.
The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission is currently meeting to discuss policies that would crack down even further on use of this gear, and Jacobson is there covering the event.
Then reporter Annelise Gisebert, a Japan-based freelance journalist, shares how she conducted a follow-up investigation into who was doing business with DOF while it was conducting its illegal shark finning operation. She tells us that most of DOF’s tuna was purchased by the seafood trading arm of Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation.
The investigations:
- Exclusive: Shark finning rampant across Chinese tuna firm’s fleet
- How Mitsubishi vacuumed up tuna from a rogue Chinese fishing fleet
In September of 2021, Mongabay published its first exposé of DOF, an award-winning investigation that looked into the company’s labor practices and living conditions on its fishing vessels. That investigation came after the news broke that four Indonesian deckhands had fallen sick and died from unknown illnesses due to the horrendous conditions on one of their boats.
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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter via @mikeg2001.
See related coverage here at Mongabay:
As shark numbers plummet, nations seek ban on devastatingly effective gear
