EDITORIAL | Requiem for Mahachai: EU's Green zealot bullies turn thriving Thai fishing port into ghost town
During a recent holiday in Bangkok my wife and I were taken to what, when I last visited about 15 years ago, was a very large and thriving fishing port.
I write of Mahachai, located about an hour’s drive south-west of Bangkok on the Gulf of Siam. Not long ago, it was one of the largest and most prosperous fishing ports in Asia with an impressive fleet, a busy fish market and numerous very substantial seafood processing factories.
Not any more, though. Now, thanks to the depredations of mainly European environmental zealots, Mahachai is essentially a ghost town. Half its shops and workshops are boarded up, large factories and the once bustling fish market have been abandoned, sunken fishing boats litter the port and others have trees sprouting from their working decks.
Even the large local private school, one of the most successful in Thailand, has seen enrolments plunge from 3,500 to 2,500 pupils. If you have read John Steinbeck’s novella Cannery Row, you will know what I mean.
We saw only one working fishing boat during our three hours in Mahachai. Once there were hundreds of vessels there including large trawlers and reefer ships that roamed the high seas, returning with valuable catches from all over the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Siam.
As our host, my old friend Wicharn Sirichai, the boss of the once large and profitable Sirichai Fisheries company, and former Thai senator, explained, “This has all happened as a result of the deceptive and dishonest lobbying of European environmental NGOs that have persuaded their national governments, and through them, the EU, to threaten the Thai Government with trade sanctions forcing it to almost completely close its domestic and international fishing industry”.
The town and its port have been hit very hard. Of course, while the fishing industry and its employees have been effectively wiped out, the bureaucratic “fat cats” who administered their destruction are still sitting in their large and comfortably air-conditioned offices in the centre of the town. Presumably, having liquidated the industry they were once employed to manage, they have little left to do.
Presumably, too, the Thai Government will be satisfied that its motor vehicle, electronics and cut flower industries, that are also active around Mahachai, will continue to be able to sell their products in Europe.
For the time being, at least. Longer term, the whims of the noisy demanding European NGOs could easily change that agreeable present situation.
This phenomenon is, of course, nothing new. It is just that Mahachai presents a stark, depressing and frightening example of what can happen when activist extremists gain political power and influence. We have seen that with fishing operations over much of the developed world as well as with farming, fish farming, mining and forestry whenever they do.
Those same unthinking and inhumane people give no thought to the very real human and economic consequences of their self-serving and self-aggrandising actions.
To them, the Thai fishermen and their families are simply just collateral damage. They are going to “save the planet” no matter what it costs to do so.
Worse still, despite the destruction this has wrought, the Thai fleets in the Indian Ocean have inevitably been replaced by those from countries such as China, Russia and Spain, which completely ignore the irrational green dreams of the EU.
The Thai fishing industry’s demise clearly illustrates the self-serving deception of the international NGO grifter class. They loudly proclaimed that “the science” proved that the Thai fishing industry had fished its own waters to extinction and that its distant water fleets were doing the same off east Africa and the Middle East.
That ludicrous claim was obviously impossible if you stop to think about it. Long before a resource is fished to extinction, economic reality will force the cessation of fishing activity. No fishing boat owner in his right mind will waste expensive fuel and manpower to operate where there are no fish.
That fact was even more real with respect to the Thai distant water sector given the vast distances and geostrategic perils it had to overcome to reach its fishing grounds.
Right up until it was forcibly closed down, the Thai industry, despite allegedly over exploiting its own resources, reliably continued to make economically significant catches. It was making worthwhile profits and contributing substantially to Thailand’s balance of trade.
Furthermore, it seemed quite capable of maintaining that positive and completely sustainable capability into the long-term foreseeable future. It could not have done that if there were no fish!
In much of Europe and the United Kingdom, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, once flourishing, export earning fishing industries have similarly been severely depleted, if not destroyed.
I have seen more than ninety per cent of the fleet in some ports forcibly scrapped. In others, fisheries patrol boats outnumber the fishing vessels they are employed to “manage”.
As in Thailand, the initiatives that force such wasteful and unnecessary destruction have been inspired by the mindlessly dishonest zealotry of Western activists.
They, needless to say, have been aided and abetted by sympathetic and disgracefully biased bureaucrat fellow travellers and, sadly, in many cases, by an apathetic fishing industry that has been too lazy to unite and fight for its survival.
Now, a once flourishing industry that employed many thousands and contributed substantially to Thailand’s balance of trade is effectively dead.
Thailand, a seafood loving country, now relies on tasteless fresh water farmed fish and imports from countries that have sensibly ignored the pressure.
Despite the deceptive and misleading propaganda propounded by many European environmental NGOs, Thailand’s fish stocks were never endangered, nor were the stocks from the countries where its high seas fleet formerly fished quite legally and was welcomed.
As Wicharn Sirichai sadly concluded, “Now the fish just die of old age.” What a tragic waste!
