Callao

Peru’s attempt to protect a little fish with a big global impact

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The story Franklin Briceno and I did on the Peruvian government’s attempt to begin to effectively police the world’s biggest fishery _ the anchoveta industry _ against misbehavior by the commercial fishing fleet was published precisely as the Production Ministry announced results of this season’s catch.

The day’s headline: The fleet did not catch the full quota of 810,000 metric tons (it reported catching 732,000 tons). In the seventh week of the 10-week season that ended Jan. 31 it began breaking the rules blatantly by catching too many juveniles, which is illegal and endangers regeneration. They illegally harvested more than 18,000 tons of juveniles.

“They have no social conscience,” said vice minister Paul Phumpiu. He is trying to get the industry to divert more of its catch to human consumption but so far doesn’t seem to have much traction.

A pilot project to promote the anchoveta as table fish, chiefly by distributing free samples at markets in Peru, is about to get under way. It’s budget: about $4 million.

Peru’s capital highly vulnerable to major quake

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LIMA, Peru (AP) — The earthquake all but flattened colonial Lima, the shaking so violent that people tossed to the ground couldn’t get back up. Minutes later, a 50-foot (15-meter) wall of Pacific Ocean crashed into the adjacent port of Callao, killing all but 200 of its 5,000 inhabitants. Bodies washed ashore for weeks.

Plenty of earthquakes have shaken Peru’s capital in the 266 years since that fateful night of Oct. 28, 1746, though none with anything near the violence.

The relatively long “seismic silence” means that Lima, set astride one of the most volatile ruptures in the Earth’s crust, is increasingly at risk of being hammered by a one-two, quake-tsunami punch as calamitous as what devastated Japan last year and traumatized Santiago, Chile, and its nearby coast a year earlier, seismologists say.

Yet this city of 9 million people is sorely unprepared. Its acute vulnerability, from densely clustered, unstable housing to a dearth of first-responders, is unmatched regionally. Peru’s National Civil Defense Institute forecasts up to 50,000 dead, 686,000 injured and 200,000 homes destroyed if Lima is hit by a magnitude-8.0 quake.

Read full story on AP’s Big Story