A suitcase full of abalone

By Lucy-Claire Saunders

It is unclear how Loan Thi Dinh got her hands on 32 fresh abalones, but she barely made it to Vancouver before she was caught. Unbeknownst to her, she was being watched as she boarded an Air Canada flight at Prince Rupert’s airport in April of last year.

Air Canada staff suspected she was carrying northern abalone, a threatened shellfish that has been on a no-fish list since 1990. As soon as the plane took off, they put in a call to a Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) officer.

A few hours later, as the plane touched down at the Vancouver International Airport, two DFO officers, aided by an RCMP officer, stood ready. When Dinh disembarked with her baggage full of abalone, the officers asked her to step aside and proceeded to go through her belongings.

They quickly concluded that she was packing illegal abalones with her on the flight and she was immediately charged with illegally possessing the valuable black market commodity. According to the DFO, she has one year to pay back a $7,000 fine, which was doled out to her at the Richmond Provincial Court in April.

The amount of the fine was significant, said Nicole Gallant, who works in the DFO’s special investigation unit in Langley, adding that the DFO tries to impose fines that deter future crimes. Over the years, fines have increasingly grown heftier. In 1996, a Vancouver man was fined a mere $5,000 for possessing over 1,300 abalones.

DFO authorities do not know what Dinh planned to do with the abalones once she reached her destination in Vancouver, said Gallant. She was not known prior to the incident and it was unclear whether she acted alone or was a part of a larger sea-plundering operation.

The threatened northern abalone — a $1 million a year industry on the West Coast before the fishery was closed in 1990 due to over fishing — still fetches high-stakes dollars on the plates of Asian restaurants. Prices for abalone on the black market range depending on whether it’s fresh or dry. But on average, the primitive molluscs can fetch $25 to $50 a pound.

Most often poachers, or abalone middlemen, sell the shellfish on the black market or under the table directly to local restaurants. As fish resources are depleted, the price for certain species, including abalone, continues to skyrocket, creating an extremely lucrative and corruptible market.

And despite conservation efforts, illegal harvesters continue to hunt abalone even as it decimates the rare species.

"The mature abalone is still declining and that really highlights that illegal harvest is still the biggest problem," said Laurie Convey, a biologist and chairperson for the abalone recovery team at the DFO. "Unfortunately, there is still a lot of bad news."

While abalone is the only species on the British Columbia coast with no harvesting allowed whatsoever, it is clear that the poaching problem persists.

Two weeks ago, a Richmond woman with ties to local Asian restaurants was fined $25,000 after pleading guilty in a Richmond Court to possessing 118 pieces of northern abalone. During an investigation in 2007, DFO officers inspected a Richmond warehouse used by Wun Ta Li’s import-export business, Solid State Enterprises. They found three 50-pound boxes filled with seafood, including abalone. Li, who had come to Canada from China in 1989, claimed she did not know abalone was a protected species.

Last year, Joseph Hsin Chung Ho, who ran Golden Gate Seafood in Vancouver, was fined $50,000. Ho had bought black market abalone for $22 a pound from David McGuire, who admitted to illegally fishing the threatened species for a year, and selling it to customers in Taiwan and elsewhere.

"Illegal criminal activity has brought some fishing to a standstill, including Canada’s abalone industry," according to the National Study of Crime in the Australian Fishing Industry, a report released in June which highlighted Canada as a major player in fishing-related organized crime.

In February 2006, fisheries officers apprehended three individuals for illegally possessing 1,120 kilograms of northern abalone, numbering an estimated 11,000 mollusks — the largest amount of northern abalone ever seized in B.C.

Despite high rates of poaching there might be a light at the end of the tunnel if harvesters quit their activities, Convey said, with a tone of optimism in her voice. Because young abalone hide in rocky crevices to avoid predators, they are difficult to observe and count. As part of recovery efforts, "condos" have been built to attract young abalone by mimicking their natural hiding places.

Through this project, 32 abalone condos have been installed at eight sites, and juvenile abalone have been observed at each of the six sites that were recently inspected along B.C.’s central and northern coast.

"That’s a good sign for the future," Convey said, "provided they’re given the opportunity to grow up without being taken."