The discovery by the Ecuadoran Navy of a vast fishing armada of 340 Chinese vessels just off the biodiverse Galapagos Islands stirred outrage both in Ecuador and overseas.
Under pressure after Ecuador’s strident response, China has given mixed signals that it could begin to reel in its vast international fishing fleet.
Its embassy in Ecuador declared a “zero tolerance” policy toward illegal fishing and this week, it announced that it is tightening the rules for its enormous flotilla with a series of new regulations.
Illustration: Kevin Sheu
However, with 325 of those 340 ships remaining off Ecuador and Ecuadoran Navy General Commander Rear Admiral Darwin Jarrin saying last week that nearly half of those vessels had intermittently switched off their satellite communications — breaching the rules of the regional fisheries management organization — the episode has shown how difficult it is for small nations to stand up to China’s distant fleet even when it descends on the archipelago that inspired Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
China’s vast fishing fleet, by far the world’s largest, has been overfishing seas much further from the world’s gaze than the islands known for their giant tortoises and iguanas. From West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea to the Korean Peninsula, the fleet has moved into the waters of other countries — switching off transponders to avoid detection, depleting fish stocks and threatening food security for what are often poor coastal communities.
In East Asia, fishing vessels might even act as the vanguard of an aggressive geopolitical strategy aimed at asserting territorial claims.
China’s new regulations this week include harsher penalties for companies and captains involved in illegal, unreported and unregulated — or IUU — fishing, but conservationists monitoring the Galapagos episode are skeptical.
“Beyond this one-sided announcement, the problem remains the same,” said Pablo Guerrero, marine conservation director for WWF Ecuador. “These boats operate without observers on board. They do not return to port. They transship their catch to mother vessels, which land the catch at ports. So, in a nutshell, they are fishing all the time, the fishing operation doesn’t stop.”
The fleet is a vast and complex network.
Among the hundreds of vessels are fuel providers, fishing boats, tender boats and reefers, some of which camouflage unregistered boats, Guerrero said.
Many vessels spend long periods at sea where shocking human rights violations have been reported.
UNDERREPORTED FLEET SIZE
Non-governmental organization Global Fishing Watch and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) think tank have used cutting-edge technology and data analysis to reveal that the size and scope of China’s distant-water fleet has been hugely underreported.
The ODI found that the fleet had 16,966 vessels, five times more than previous estimates. By contrast, the US distant-water fleet comprises 300 boats.
In 2017, as part of its 13th fisheries five-year plan, China announced plans to cap the size of the fleet to 3,000 vessels by 2020.
“We were shocked by the results because we were expecting 4,000 or 5,000 vessels,” said Miren Gutierrez, lead author of the ODI report.
The research, which took more than a year, also found that nearly 1,000 of the boats were using “flags of convenience” and at least 183 vessels were involved in suspected IUU fishing, for which China ranked the worst-performing nation in a global index last year.
“On the surface, it looks like a very fragmented fleet, but we suspect that the core of it is probably in the hands of a few companies,” Gutierrez said.
Research has shown that the Chinese government heavily subsidizes fishing through tax exemptions, mostly on fuel, to the value of US$16.6 billion per year, or 47 percent of total global fishing subsidies.
“Most of this overfishing is not illegal — that’s the problem,” Gutierrez said, as most of it goes on in international waters.
Most of the fleet’s vessels are trawlers — banned within China’s territorial waters and notorious for damaging ecosystems by dragging nets along the seafloor. Other common boats are longliners, for larger fish such as tuna or shark, and squid-jiggers, which usually operate in deeper waters.
“To shift the dynamic, there needs to be radical transparency,” said Philip Chou (周維德), an expert on distant-water fishing at Oceana, a marine conservation group. “So far, the evidence has not shown that [the Chinese government] has taken it further than rhetoric.”
China would need to open up about its catch, the real-time location of its fleets, the ownership of fishing vessels, and the opaque bilateral or regional agreements that it has made with low-income coastal nations, Chou said.
For example, in West Africa, a 2018 report by the Environmental Justice Foundation found that 90 percent of Ghanaian-flagged vessels had Chinese involvement.
China’s self-declared shake-up proposes changes to high-seas transshipment rules — the movement of cargo from one vessel to another — along with reforms to distant-water fishing.
MOVING BEYOND RHETORIC
It also announced two three-month fishing moratoriums: one west of the Galapagos, from September to November, and another beginning in July in the south Atlantic, near Argentina.
The world’s biggest seafood exporter is also mooted to be planning to ratify the Port State Measures Agreement, the first internationally binding accord in which ports around the world pledge not to allow illegal or unregulated fishing boats to land catches.
“It’s a significant concession,” Environmental Justice Foundation executive director Steve Trent said. “But in the context of global fisheries it’s not enough — it’s not nearly enough.”
China hauled up about 15 percent of the world’s reported fishing catch in 2018, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), more than twice the second and third-ranked countries.
However, the lack of transparency means that it is impossible to truly know how much seafood humans take from the ocean amid an alarming drop in marine life over the past half-century.
The FAO estimates that illegal fishing has an annual cost of up to US$23 billion. It has also calculated that nearly 60 million people worked in fishing or aquaculture in 2016, 85 percent of them in Asia.
Ecuador is one of a few small nation states that have pushed back against the Chinese flotillas. In the hotly disputed South China Sea, Indonesia sent F-16 fighter jets along with navy, coastguard and fishing boats to repel 63 Chinese fishing boats and four Chinese Coast Guard vessels from its waters in January.
North Korean fishing boats might have come off worse from exchanges with China’s “dark fleets,” amid reports of “ghost boats” washing up on Japanese shores containing the bodies of North Korean fishers. In its backyard, the Chinese fleet has a fearsome reputation for systemic illegal fishing and aggressive tactics when faced with competitors or foreign patrol vessels.
China signed a key UN fish stocks agreement in 1996, but never ratified it. It is a member of seven regional fishery management organizations, or RFMOs, but its distant-water fleet operates outside of those frameworks, said Mercedes Rosello, director of House of Ocean, a not-for-profit legal consultancy that monitors IUU fishing.
“When you are looking at thousands of vessels, the rules and mechanisms which that flag state adopts are of huge transcendence,” Rosello said.
The US, Japan and the EU, which make up about 70 percent of the global seafood market, need to take aggressive measures to disrupt Chinese vessels’ IUU fish catches from entering international supply chains, Trent said.
Without wholescale structural change by China and the system of global governance of the ocean to make sure that the Chinese do abide by the law, the world’s fish stocks would continue their precipitous decline, he said.
“The people who suffer first and worst are almost always the coastal communities who rely on those fisheries for their survival, wellbeing and food,” he said. “Exactly what happens in the Galapagos happens in locations around the world and it’s terrifying.”
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