The end of the wilderness: poachers pillage Russia’s wealth of salmon

…Poaching in Kamchatka is on such a large scale that, like the sturgeon, the Pacific salmon is at risk of disappearing altogether. The 750-mile peninsula is one of the world’s last truly great wildernesses, home to the rare Steller’s sea eagle, puffins and brown bears, who roam around its geysers and snow-covered calderas, or collapsed volcanos. Kamchatka has more than 300 volcanoes, 29 still smoulderingly active.

As the main food source here rapidly disappears, however, conservationists fear that Kamchatka is on the brink of ecological meltdown. Laura Williams, director of WWF’s Kamchatka office, said: “When you fly over Kamchatka you are in awe of the wilderness below you. There are no roads and no settlements. I think right now the threats are relatively localised – with the exception of salmon, which is very widely overfished.”

In Soviet times, the Kamchatka peninsula was a strategic military base, off-limits to foreigners. Poaching was severely punished. But with the collapse of communism, and Russia’s transition to a market economy, the law has ceased to exist. Instead, poachers pay off the officials tasked with protecting the fish. Asked whether politicians, the police or ordinary Russians were involved in this trade, Valery Vorobyev, the director of one of Kamchatka’s largest fishing firms, Akros, said: “Everybody.”

The result of this ubiquitous criminal enterprise, according to Mr Vorobyev, is that the region’s once-abundant marine life is vanishing. Out in the Sea of Okhotsk, a slate-grey expanse of frozen water that stretches from Kamchatka’s western coast to the gulag town of Magadan, the crabs have all but gone.

Guardian