China’s Global Fishing Fleet Intrudes on Distant Waters

China’s “distant-water fishing” (DWF) activities are both figurative and literal. Figuratively, the term “fishing the high seas” (远洋捕捞, yuǎnyáng bǔlāo) describes the phenomenon of cash-strapped local authorities replenishing their coffers by arresting private business owners in other localities and seizing their assets. But in a literal sense, it refers to the thousands of Chinese fishing vessels that have sprawled across the globe to plunder fish stocks, often by anchoring in international waters and launching incursions into other countries’ maritime zones to expand their catch. This practice has allowed China to compensate for its own overfished waters and expand its maritime territorial claims, but it has also contributed to human rights abuses and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing activities. Several recent media reports have provided detail on this practice and its harmful effects on local fishing economies. This week at The Wall Street Journal, Ryan Dubé and photographer Angela Ponce reported on local fishermen’s criticisms of Chinese overfishing off the coast of Peru:

[Francisco] Chiroque and the Peruvian fishing industry blame the hundreds of gigantic Chinese fishing ships patrolling the edge of Peru’s national waters. Peru’s squid catch is down 70% so far this year, which the fishing industry says is a result of the industrial-scale fishing that Chinese companies have brought to seas normally plied by individuals in small boats, sometimes called artisan fishermen.

“They fish and fish, day and night,” said Chiroque, 49 years old, the head of the squid-fisherman association in Paita, a city on Peru’s far northern Pacific coast that is home to its squid-fishing industry. “The plundering is awful.”

[…] “It’s unfair competition,” said Elsa Vega, president of an association of Peru’s artisan fishermen. “It’s like David and Goliath.”

[…Segundo Meza, a 54-year-old squid fisherman,] now spends his days helping to care for his grandson. The boy’s father, also a fisherman, left to work on a blueberry farm. To save money, his family stopped paying utility bills and skips breakfast. 

[…] Some fishermen here say they have seen the Chinese ships fishing inside Peru’s waters, accusing them of shutting off their tracking devices to avoid detection. [Source]

In September, Peruvian authorities seized about 1.3 tons of illegally harvested shark fins, a delicacy in China and some other countries, amid plummeting global shark populations due to overfishing. But Chinese DWF practices are by no means limited to Peru. Analyzing the impact of China’s fishing policies on West Africa last month at Global Voices, Ruohan Xie and Desire Nimubona wrote that Chinese fleets off the coast of Senegal are devastating local fishing economies and throwing many fisherman out of work:

In Senegal, about 220,000 people work in the fishing industry; 90 percent are artisanal fishers, while the remaining 10 percent work on foreign vessels, joint ventures, or local industrial trawlers. 

Now, [young Senegalese fishermen Moktar Diop and Mohamed Jawo] must reach remote waters to get fish, as much of the coast is occupied by Chinese vessels. The competition between Chinese vessels and local boats has become impossible, they say, and, in a country where the jobless rate exceeds 23 percent, many young people are losing hope.

[…] According to the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers, illegal fishing has resulted in the loss of over 300,000 artisanal or traditional fishing jobs in West Africa. Consequently, many people are forced to seek work in other industries or even abroad. Many young people, unable to stay in their hometowns, try to migrate to Europe through Morocco, risking their lives along the way.

[…Those suffering most] are the local small-scale fishermen who, for generations, have relied on the coast to sustain themselves and their families. Mohammed Jawo said: “We have skills, but we watch helplessly in the face of this injustice inflicted on us by contracts that grant our oceans to others who will enrich themselves. We hope that the new Government of Ousmane Sonko will renegotiate these unfair contracts.” [Source]

As Nikkei Asia reported in August, Chinese fishing vessels have also been highly active in waters off the coast of Japan, even after the release of treated wastewater from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant—a policy that was fiercely criticized by the Chinese government, which subsequently banned all imports of Japanese seafood products. Some Chinese vessels brought fish caught in Japanese coastal waters back to China, where it was offloaded and fraudulently sold as “Chinese-sourced.” Some local Japanese fishermen have reported being driven from their own fishing grounds by the aggressive maneuvers of Chinese fishing vessels. In response to China’s growing maritime fishing fleet, the Quad (which includes Japan, the U.S., Australia, and India) plans to launch joint patrols to monitor vessels in the Indo-Pacific and counter illegal fishing.

Facing accusations of unsustainable fishing practices, China has invested heavily in aquaculture in recent years and reduced marine-capture fisheries, resulting in an 18 percent drop in its marine catch from 2015 to 2022, as well as a drop in its total number of DWF vessels. However, China’s DWF output still increased by four percent in 2022, and the decrease in Chinese DWF vessels might be significantly overstated due to the practice of reflagging those vessels. As Ian Urbina, Pete McKenzie, and Milko Schvartzman revealed in a major investigation for The Ocean Outlaw Project in August, China has increasingly employed the tactic of paying to ‘flag in’ their ships so they can operate in other nations’ fishing grounds, giving China “nearshore supremacy”:

In recent years, from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, China has been buying its way into restricted national fishing grounds, primarily using a process known as “flagging in.” This method typically involves the use of business partnerships to register foreign ships under the flag of another country, thereby allowing those vessels to fish in that country’s territorial waters.

Chinese companies now control at least 62 industrial fishing vessels that fly the Argentine flag, including the majority of Argentina’s squid fleet. Many of these companies have been tied to a variety of crimes, including dumping fish at sea, turning off their transponders, and engaging in tax evasion and fraud. Trade records show that much of what is caught by these vessels is sent back to China, but some of the seafood is also exported to countries including the United States, Canada, Italy, and Spain.

China now operates almost 250 of these flagged-in vessels in the waters of countries including Micronesia, Kenya, Ghana, Senegal, Morocco, and Iran.

The size of this hidden fleet was not previously known. Nor was the extent of its illegal behavior, concentration in certain foreign waters or the amount of seafood coming from these ships that winds up in European and American markets. The scope of the armada matters because most countries require vessels to be owned locally to keep profits within the country and make it easier to enforce fishing regulations. Flagging-in undermines those aims, said Duncan Copeland, the former executive director of TMT, a non-profit research organization specializing in maritime crime. And aside from the sovereignty and financial concerns, food security is also undermined by the export of this vital source of affordable protein, added Dyhia Belhabib, a principal investigator at Ecotrust Canada, a charity focused on environmental activism. [Source]