THE LATEST NEWS and advice on fly fishing, fly fishing gear, fly fishing trips, and fly fishing books and media.Interview with a Poacher
"'We catch so many fish that the different salmon species no longer return. Once we've exhausted one species we move on to the next,'" Alexander said, offering me a spoonful of orange salmon caviar and a cup of tea." Luke Harding's interview with a Russian poacher is remarkable not so much for the revelation of how extensive the poaching is on the Kamchatka peninsula, but for how little is apparently done to stop them. In the U.K.'s The Guardian.
Comments
It was pretty much inevitable that this would happen. Russia's far east is a wide open frontier with almost no regulation or law enforcement of any kind in any industry. Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island were beautiful pristine wilderness frontiers when the Soviet Union collapsed. I lived in northern Japan at the time, and had firsthand knowledge of these places.
Immediately, the Japanese brand of entrepreneurs started teaming up with Russian crime syndicates to develop new "business" ventures. The few people who were in the loop knew then that the rape, pillage, and plunder was beginning and that no one would do a thing to stop it.
Posted by: KW Morrow | June 22, 2007 1:52 PM