Most of the lobsters come from the country’s Mosquito coast, where Indigenous Miskito people live in remote villages. Image by Pauline Walsh Jacobson via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
For the Miskito divers, though, very little has changed, Driver found. In the villages she visited, paralyzed former divers in wheelchairs are a common sight. Many men have died on the job. Yet their sons continue to pursue lobster diving since there’s no other work, Driver reported.
Boat captains also continue to pressure divers to catch lobsters without leaving any marks on them, so they can be sold as trap-caught ones, Chris Williams, a fisheries expert and social scientist at the International Transport Workers Federation, told Driver. Moreover, he said, diver- and trap-caught lobsters become mixed at processing facilities, making it difficult to determine their true source.
According to Williams, most Honduran lobster landings still come from diving, and Honduran factories are aware of this.
In 2004, families of 42 divers filed a case against the Honduran state at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, for failing to regulate and supervise the dangerous conditions Miskito divers work in. The court ruled in the divers’ favor in 2021. It ordered the government to pay monetary compensation to the 42 families, and to regulate the fishing industry and oversee the condition of the divers.
But Driver pointed out there are many more disabled divers still waiting for justice, many of whom couldn’t participate in the case because of a lack of finances. Moreover, dive-caught lobster is still finding its way into U.S. markets, according to the Civil Eats investigation, although it was unable to identify the main buyers.
The NFWF-operated FIP fund has concluded. But another organization, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), has an ongoing FIP in Honduras that aims to make the trap-caught lobster fishery sustainable. With companies like Red Lobster and Costco Wholesale listed as participants, the FIP aims to meet the Marine Stewardship Council sustainability certification standard by December 2024.
The WWF-run FIP doesn’t tackle the dive-caught lobster fishery. But in its reports, WWF says it is making efforts to address labor and human rights issues within the trap-caught fishery. Red Lobster, on its website, notes that it does not serve dive-caught lobster caught from Central America “due to diver safety.”
The questions of who is buying dive-caught lobsters, though, and how buyers can tell them apart from trap-caught ones, remain unresolved. As the Civil Eats story reveals, this dangerous mode of lobster fishing continues to flourish, putting divers’ lives at risk every day.
Banner image: A Caribbean spiny lobster (Panulirus argus). Image by Kevin Bryant via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).
Spiny lobsters raise an undersea racket that can be heard miles away
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Animals, Biodiversity, Coastal Ecosystems, Environment, Fisheries, Fishing, Food, Food Industry, food security, Green, Indigenous Communities, Indigenous Cultures, Indigenous Peoples, Marine, Marine Animals, Marine Conservation, Marine Stewardship Council, Oceans, Overfishing, Sustainability, Wildlife
Central America, Honduras, Latin America
Source link : https://news.mongabay.com/2024/01/report-human-tragedy-stalks-the-prized-honduran-lobster-industry/
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Publish date : 2024-01-25 03:00:00
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