Fishing for Pirates

French authorities are cracking down on illegal fishing by tracking downpirate fishing boats from space. They use satellites to spot the pirate vessels, and then they send patrol boats to intercept the illegal operations and enforce the law.

The French authorities started the program two years ago to deal with operations that illegally took Patagonian toothfish from waters around a French territory in the Southern Indian Ocean. The toothfish yields a big profit on the black market, and it's being depleted by illegal operations. French fishing boats were licensed to take six or seven thousands tons of toothfish from the territorial waters every year. According to some estimates, illegal fishing took six times more than that. The French government worked with a satellite company known as CLS. Antoine Monsaingeon works with CLS. He says land-based radar was not sufficient for law enforcement around the remote Kerguelen Islands."You need radar that can see at night, through the clouds, and on a longrange -- and only satellite can do that."Monsaingeon says the company relied on two different satellites. One was used by Canada to track icebergs; the other was used by the European Space Agency to monitor oil spills."It very often happens that when you launch a satellite, you launch it for one given purpose and then you discover later that it can be used for something else."In this case, the strategy paid off immediately. In July of 2004, the satellites detected a vessel that was in French waters illegally. The Navy sent a patrol boat to track it down and fire a warning shot across its bow. The approach worked. Last year, the French government reported that the surveillance system has cut illegal fishing by 90 percent.

Author: Adam Hinterthuer
SOURCES: "Envisat radar surveillance protects endangered prehistoricfish" news release from the European Space Agency: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMPLU638FE_Protecting_0.html CLS, a subsidiary of the French Space Agency; online at: http://www.cls.fr/welcome_en.html