(Sean Mantesso’s article from the ABC NEWS Australia on 19 December 2020)
The sheer size
of the fleet fuelled Ecuador's urgency: more than 350 Chinese fishing boats
were detected, outnumbering its own navy and those of Peru and Chile combined. Lieutenant-Commander
Christa Caldwell of the US Coast Guard, which sent a vessel down to the region
to provide surveillance on the fleet, said the magnitude of fishing activity
was unprecedented.
The flotilla was plundering waters that are among the most biodiverse in the world: the Galapagos Marine Reserve is home to the greatest biomass of sharks on the planet. Satellite tracking data showed the boats forming a near-perfect line along the boundary of Ecuador's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) — however the US Coast guard did not detect any of the Chinese boats cross over into Ecuadorian waters.
"The issue
is that fish don't know borders," Lieutenant-Commander Caldwell told the
ABC. Fishing in international waters is not illegal, even if those waters sit
right beside areas of great ecological importance.
A map with
satellite overlay showing the location of Chinese fishing boats near the
Galapagos Islands EEZ in 2020. The Chinese boats gathered right at the edge of
Ecuador's EEZ, close to the Galapagos Islands. And that's the real catch: even
with a veneer of legality, these activities are potentially catastrophic for
the environment and for local fish stocks.
Armed with huge Chinese Government subsidies, this
massive fleet is now being deployed across nearly every ocean of the world —
including on Australia's doorstep, with a new planned Chinese-funded fisheries
development near Papua New Guinea's Daru Island, which lies in the Torres Strait.
China's distant
water fleet is enormous even compared to that of wealthy nations like the US. Keeping
the industry strong has been a priority for China's central government: in
2013, President Xi Jinping urged Chinese mariners to "build bigger ships
and venture even farther and catch bigger fish".
Beijing says its
distant water fishing fleet numbers around 2,500 ships, but one study claimed
it could have as many as 17,000 boats trawling the world's oceans. The US, by
comparison, has just 300 distant water vessels.
China is a
fisheries superpower: according to the UN, it consumes around 36 per cent of
total global fish production, and hauls in 15.2 million tonnes of marine life a
year, or 20 per cent of the world's entire annual catch.
Its fleets,
including those in the Galapagos, are vast and complex. There are trawlers,
refuelling ships, freezer and transport vessels that allow them to continue
operating without going to port for months at a time, sometimes longer.
Ian Urbina, the author of Outlaw Ocean, has spent years writing about fishing on the high seas and says while illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing (IUU fishing) was an issue worldwide, China is unique.
"More than
any other fishing fleet in the world, [China] travels farther, stays at sea
longer, pulls up more fish than anyone, and is also more routinely invading
national waters," he said. It's unsurprising then that China ranks number
one on the IUU fishing index. The fleet is routinely found to be violating the
law, targeting endangered shark species, falsifying licenses and documentation,
as well as committing human rights abuses onboard its vessels.
And while United
Nations maritime law mandates that fishing vessels are required to use a
transponder to transmit their location at all times, Mr Urbina said many
vessels deliberately switched them off. "Some of them are going dark for
short periods, and what they're doing in those periods is unknown."
This year's
flotilla was the biggest, but Chinese trawlers had been fishing in those waters
for years. In 2017, the Chinese refrigeration vessel Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999 was
pursued and boarded by Ecuadorian authorities inside the Galapagos Marine
Reserve. On board, they found a gruesome haul: 6,000 frozen shark carcasses,
many of endangered species, were seized.
A large number
of frozen fish is found in a Chinese vessel, seized in the Galapagos Marine
Reserve. The vessel's captain and crew were charged with a number of crimes.
Shark fins are a
delicacy and a lucrative trade in Asia, but fishing for them and removing their
fins is illegal in many jurisdictions, including Ecuador. Fishing ships have
even been deployed in the contested South China Sea — although fishing does not
appear to be the core objective there.
"The Chinese are using their fishing fleet to assert their presence in the South China Sea," said Tabitha Grace Mallory, an expert on China's fishing policies at the University of Washington. "In some cases [their] fishing vessels aren't even fishing, they're likely to be maritime militia vessels, which are getting paid to just assert some kind of presence in the area."
