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Poachers Drive Macedonia's Unique Trout Towards Extinction
August 15, 2005
SKOPJE, Macedonia , August 15, 2005 (ENS) - At a fish restaurant in the Macedonian capital Skopje, a waiter smiles winningly across the table.
"The trout is very fresh - it was caught only the other day," he murmurs. "They brought it 200 kilometers from Lake Ohrid to our restaurant, where we serve it according to the national recipe."
He adds conspiratorially, "If you were caught with this type of fish, you could go to prison." It is a routine exchange between diners and waiters in top restaurants across the country.
In February, Macedonia imposed a total ban on fishing the Ohrid trout, a unique and now gravely threatened species. Yet fishermen, smugglers and restaurant owners continue to flout the law and deplete the remaining stocks.
The main explanation for their behavior is simple - money. A glance at any restaurant menu reveals that the Ohrid trout sells for over 30 euro per kilogram (US$14 per pound), a considerable sum in this relatively poor country. For many, the temptation to get their hands on such easy income is great.
The Ohrid trout, or salmo letnica, highly prized by fishermen and gourmets alike, was identified as a unique species in 1924.
It is found only in Lake Ohrid, which was formed in the Ice Age and has waters so pure that with the naked eye one can easily see the bottom even when it is more than 10 meters (33 feet) deep.
For centuries a staple food for the peasants and fishermen who lived around the water's edge, stocks held up well until recent times. Until the 1980s, some 220 tons of trout were caught each year and it was not uncommon for anglers to catch fish weighing five kilograms (11 pounds).
The Ohrid trout has been stocked in Lake Ohrid by fisheries managers since 1934. (Photo courtesy City of Ohrid )
But the last two decades have not been kind to the lake's most famous culinary emblem. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, deregulation, overfishing and the introduction of non-native species have had a calamitous effect.
The Ohrid Trout Company, the Macedonian company responsible for commercial fishing until last year, employed game wardens to protect the lake's natural resources. But when the government ended its concession to the company in March 2004, the wardens disappeared.
Catches have tailed off dramatically. In 1996, the IUCN-World Conservation Union placed the fish on its Red List of endangered species.
In February, Macedonia's government finally took action and introduced a total ban on fishing in the lake, but the fishing has carried on regardless. A network of smugglers and buyers ensures that anyone with enough cash - including leading politicians and celebrities - continue to devour Ohrid trout in many top restaurants.
Groups of local fishermen are responsible for most of the illegal catches that are hauled out of the lake.
One restaurant owner in Struga, at the northern end of Lake Ohrid, admitted that fishermen offer their illegal catches to a tight-knit, secretive ring of restaurant owners and fish merchants.
"They only deliver the trout to those they trust - to restaurant owners or fish shops," he said. "The fishmongers will only sell it on if they know you.
"They know it's forbidden to fish for trout on the lake and that it may have consequences, which is why they are afraid to offer the fish to strangers."
Fishermen use trusted middlemen to phone up the restaurants, or else they show up themselves to offer their illegal catch.
The restaurants openly flout the rules. Seven of the best-known places in the town of Ohrid still list the trout on their menus. Five offered to serve the fish to reporters posing as diners.
Boris Georgievski, from the angling association St. Apostol Petar, said that lakeside eateries had ignored an initiative to remove Ohrid trout from the menus. Only one, Hotel Donco, had gone along with the scheme, he said, and, "the rest said such a move would damage tourism."
It was indicative of the slack approach to the ban that when the great tenor Jose Carreras was invited to open this year's Ohrid summer festival, the organizers boasted that the singer would be served the local trout.
Trout is regularly prepared in the presidential villa in Ohrid when senior government officials are in residence.
The problem is not limited to Ohrid - a number of surrounding lakeside villages also have restaurants that serve trout.
To find out just how easy it is to taste the delicacy, these reporters went to a restaurant in Peshtani. There, staff offered to provide trout for up to 10 people with just a day's notice.
While one restaurant owner said that impoverished fishermen had no option but to defy the ban in order to feed their families, sporting anglers are less sympathetic.
Georgievski says the ban has only stimulated illegal fishing. "Before, there used to be only three people from the village of Trpejca casting nets, but now there are perhaps just three who aren't doing it," he said.
The ban has pushed up the price of trout, giving poachers another incentive. Poachers said that the wholesale price for fresh Ohrid trout on the black market had jumped to 850 denars, or around 12 euro, per kilogram from only 600 denars before the ban.
Sources among both poachers and the police said most illegal fishermen in Macedonia are based in the villages of Kalista, Radozda, Andon Dukov, Sveti Stefan, Pestani and Trpejca. They cast their illegal nets at night and gather them in at dawn, when visibility is still poor.
Boats on Lake Ohrid, Macedonia. (Photo courtesy Babak Fakhamzadeh )
Police say they lack the equipment to spot nocturnal poachers. "It's very hard to catch illegal fishermen on the spot," said Ohrid Police Chief Branko Jovanovski.
"The fishermen often put nets in the lake at night and leave them for days," he added. "They collect them later, when our officers are unable to see them."
The police have arrested few poachers, but have had more success in impounding nets on the lake. In the first six months of 2005, Ohrid police confiscated more than 1,200 fishing nets found in the lake.
It is questionable whether arresting more poachers would have much of an impact on the trade, as fines are small.
"Even if they do catch them, the penalties are symbolic at about 25 euro," said Georgievski. He added that while police charged more 70 poachers in 2004, not one of them was convicted.
In any case, the police do not see chasing poachers as their priority. Their main mission is to guard the border with Albania, which runs through the western end of the lake.
Macedonian scientists are sounding the alarm over the fish's future. The scale of the poaching and the methods used are threatening the trout with extinction, they say.
"They are catching fish throughout the year, including in the breeding season when they should be left alone," said Zoran Spirkovski of Ohrid's Hydro-Biological Institute.
"Poachers are not fishing selectively as the fishermen used to do in the past," he said. "The nets are also too large and the mesh so fine that poachers can catch huge quantities of fish with a single cast."
Spirkovski is not optimistic about the trout's chances of survival. "If fishing really stops until stocks reach a sustainable level, commercial fishing could begin again," he said. "But until now, profits have always come before sustainability."
One proposed solution is to increase fish stocks by artificial spawning. This involves catching adult fish, stripping them of their eggs and then hatching the eggs in managed environments.
But the adult fish still need to be caught in the first place and hatchery scientists say the number of eggs available for collection by the three existing hatcheries - two in Macedonia and one in Albania - has fallen. Of a projected figure of four million eggs targeted for collection and artificial hatching this year, the hatcheries only caught three million, despite increased efforts.
Scientists say that even if an effective ban was in place it might be too late, as it would not apply to the waters lying in Albania. There is no ban on trout fishing in Albanian, and none is yet in sight.
Dejan Panovski, of the Ohrid Lake protection project, explained, "Albania doesn't ban fishing, as it is the primary source of livelihood for many villages on the Albanian shore."
At the frontier town of Pogradec, on the Albanian side of the lake, living standards are lower than in Macedonia. Some 250 families in Pogradec depend on trout fishing for their only source of income.
Restaurants and small eateries in the town all offer Ohrid trout. The trout are also caught for private consumption by Albanian fishermen and their families.
Unlike Macedonia, it is not illegal to catch the fish here, as the two countries have never harmonized fishing legislation. The discrepancy is a source of concern for anglers' groups in Ohrid and Struga, in Macedonia, who point out that stocks will never revive while trout continues to be fished in large quantities in Albania's sector of the lake.
"Much of the smuggling is coming from the Albanian side," Georgievski says.
But Naum Gekprifti, president of an ecological group based in Pogradec, disagrees. A total ban on trout fishing in Albania is unrealistic while so many people live off the catches, he said.
"There used to be 500 families in Pogradec who lived off trout fishing," Gekprifiti said. "But many of them packed up as there were simply not enough fish."
Gekprifiti said the decline in fishing in Pogradec was echoed all along the Albanian shoreline of Lake Ohrid. "In the villages of Lin, Piskupat, Hudensiht and Pogradec there used to be 1,200 fishing boats but now there are less than 500."
Gekprifiti insisted that the scale of Albanian trout smuggling is often exaggerated, while the motives of those taking part were also different from those of Macedonian poachers. "The Albanians are doing it for survival while the Macedonians are doing it to make more money," he said.
Macedonian police say that in 2004 they logged seven cases of Albanian fishermen poaching inside Macedonian territorial waters. They suspect that some trout sold in Macedonian restaurants was fished by groups operating from across the border.
Albanian customs officers say they do their best to stop road transport of illegally caught fish. "Some individuals may still get a couple of kilograms of trout past us, but there are no large quantities of trout crossing the border," one officer said.
Like the Macedonian police, however, they admit that their main task is not catching smuggled fish but targeting the trade in narcotics.
While Macedonian police and customs officials say they do their best to prevent trout poaching and smuggling, nothing is being done to penalize restaurants offering Ohrid trout on the menu.
A 1984 law on restaurants obliged establishments to declare the origins of all fish on their menus. But parliament removed the relevant paragraph when the law was amended in 1993.
"We aren't sure why that paragraph was erased," said Blagoja Stevanovski, head of the country's agricultural inspection department. "We are now trying to get it reinstated."
Stevanovski said Macedonia's animal veterinary and market inspection department is now in charge of checking whether restaurants are serving Ohrid trout.
But a veterinary inspector said that his colleagues did no such thing, because of confusion over which section of the department was responsible. "Our inspection teams are only interested in the health of the fish, not its origin," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
He added that he believed the market inspection team was responsible for checking the fish's origin. But a Skopje-based market inspection official said that their department was not involved in this work either.
Ohrid trout is served in many local restaurants. (Photo courtesy City of Ohrid )
While official institutions wash their hands of the problem in this way, restaurants and hotels continue proudly to display trout on their menus.
Amid such indecision and confusion, there is little agreement on the way forward.
While some environmental groups say the existing ban should be extended and strengthened, the authorities are increasingly suggesting that it might even be dropped altogether.
Abdul Gafar Sinani, an official from Macedonia's Ministry of Agriculture, said that far from strengthening the ban on trout fishing, the government may even grant a new concession on the lake.
The government would reach a final decision in the autumn, after the current ban expires in August, he said. "In the meantime, it will find an interim solution, so there is no vacuum after August."
"The final decision will be made by the government, based on expert opinion," he said.
But Spirkovski of the Hydro-Biological Institute insisted that most experts firmly oppose any moves to resume licensed fishing. He said a proposed government tender for fishing rights was withdrawn in June under pressure from the institute and the agriculture ministry's fisheries department.
"We have delivered reports that make it very clear that no [fishing] concession should be given [in Lake Ohrid]," he added. "Other types of fish might be allowed to be fished but not trout, bleak and carp. The stocks for these species are too low."
Bone Palasevski, of the Institute of Agriculture, agrees the ban should be extended. "The ban has been very brief, so we can't assess its effects yet," he said. "Our opinion is that the ban should be prolonged."
That is also the feeling of anglers' groups like St. Apostol Petar. "The ban on fishing trout and bleak should stand for five or even 10 years," said Radovan Dimitrievski, a member of the organization's board. "The state isn't taking the problem seriously. If it did, it would have solved it by now. We've been talking about this for years but no one has listened."
{Published in cooperation with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). Igor Micevski and Meri Bakalova are trainees with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, IWPR's partner in the Balkans.}
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