White Gold Fever: The Story of Deep Sea Treasure and an Environmental Tragedy
It was early spring, nearly 15 years ago, when Belen Delgado made the discovery of a lifetime. As a fisherman in rural Mexico, Belen had a hunch that a giant bank of Callo de Hacha, a rare and incredibly expensive shellfish, lay just off the shore of his small coastal town. Together with friends, he hired a diver to plunge 70 feet below the surface and when he emerged the diver confirmed Belen’s suspicion, “wherever you step,” he said, “there’s callo.” The colony of Callo de Hacha covered 30 miles of ocean floor and was worth millions of dollars. This was the financial windfall the town desperately needed, but Belen wasn’t prepared for the chaos and greed that soon followed as his fellow fishermen succumbed to the “White Gold Fever.” This story was produced for the podcast Snap Judgment in partnership with FERN, the Food and Environment Reporting Network. It explores overfishing, climate change and the limitation of government regulations when matched against the needs of people who are working to put food on the table.
Esther Honig worked her way into journalism and built her career reporting for public radio stations across the Midwest and Colorado. She began to focus on agriculture and farm labor during her time at Harvest Public Media, a regional reporting collaborative, where she frequently contributed to NPR news, covering the impacts of Trump’s trade wars and immigration policies. Now as an independent journalist she spends her time reporting internationally from Mexico and from her home in Denver. A fluent Spanish-speaker, Esther works in audio and print to tell stories about agriculture, U.S. immigration policy, climate change, and rural issues. Her work has been featured by The Nation, Mother Jones Magazine, NPR, and Latino USA. She is a 2021 recipient of the UC Berkeley 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship.