up to the flag state of the fishermen," says Asmundsson. And many deliberately enforce no rules at all. More than 1,200 fishing trawlers are registered under flags of convenience -- Cambodia, say, or Honduras. Another 1,600 trawlers, the pirate fishermen, sail the oceans under no flags at all.Many pirate fishermen are known and their ships are on blacklists. But in international waters they can simply forbid inspectors from coming on board.This is why the international community is increasingly trying to forbid the pirates access to ports, make it impossible for them to unload their fish, and deny them food and diesel fuel. But even these sanctions don't always work.The five biggest trawlers owned by Piro-Fisch, a German-Russian charter company, were long known as impudent pirates when they entered the port of Rostock in northeastern Germany in the fall of 2005. They are on all relevant blacklists. But the ships remained untouched -- despite the fact that even the Icelandic foreign minister asked the EU Commission to prevent them from leaving the port. The trawlers left Rostock in March 2006, unobstructed and with their supplies on board. In April, after another raid, they entered the Russian seaport of Kaliningrad, where they were promptly detained.Even in legal fishery, politicians often fail to live up to their responsibility. The EU's cod quotas, for example, are still 50 percent higher than the catch volumes scientists consider barely justifiable. Sharp disputes keep erupting in the EU because some countries, instead of fishing less, push to have their quotas raised.The problem stems from the fact that in traditionally strong fishing nations, like France and Spain, no politicians want to alienate whole coastal regions. The recommendations of experts, like those with the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, are all too often ignored. In the world struggle for resources, fish are usually the losers.Many German fishermen are now searching for environmentally justifiable methods, to avoid being vilified as "fish murderers" or "environmental pigs" -- the sorts of names they are repeatedly called on coastal esplanades. For more than five years, the German fishing industry and seafood retailers have supported the Marine Stewardship Council's eco-label, which identifies seafood caught legally and in an environmentally responsible way.There is also a growing trend to provide more exact details about the origin of fish, such as whether halibut was caught off the coast of Iceland or Norway. This can make a big difference, because a fish species can be virtually wiped in one ocean region while flourishing in another.In addition, organizations like the NEAFC are attempting to establish an international monitoring regime. But the oceans are enormous and there are few inspectors.Germany has three fisheries protection vessels to monitor its territorial waters in the North Sea and Baltic Sea, as well as to take part in international patrol to places as far away as the Arctic and Canada.Monitoring on the High Seas Shortly before midnight, the "Seeadler" slips out of a naval base near Warnemunde on the Baltic Sea. The German authorities have learned that dozens of Polish fishermen, who exceeded