China’s fishing fleets threaten Pacific economies and ecologies.
China’s Massive Fishing Armada Threatens Global Fisheries
They sweep the sea in 400-ship swarms, Chinese fishing boats that—based on time of year and fishery—include trawlers, purse seiners, gill-netters, pole-and-line platforms, squid jiggers, tuna longliners, wood-hulled freighters, and sail-masted junks.
The fleet is shepherded by oil tankers, supply barges, “research” vessels, and hospital ships, shadowed by Chinese navy warships and coast guard cutters, and serviced by massive motherships with 500,000 cubic feet of frozen storage holds.
Rotating motherships ferry harvests to China and return with provisions on a continuous cycle so the fleet can keep fishing until there are no more fish and it must move on to keep fishing until there are no more fish in the new areas across the globe, from Senegal to the South Pacific.
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Chinese fishing armadas are becoming common and long-lingering sights in international waters just beyond 200-mile national exclusive economic zones (EEZ) off Africa’s and South America’s coasts and across the vast central and western Pacific, including off—and allegedly in—the sovereign waters of Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI), which are United States territories.
Marauding Chinese fishing boats have destroyed domestic commercial industries and damaged sports-fishing businesses across the Pacific, island leaders told a Congressional panel during meetings and field hearings staged on Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, Palau, and Micronesia between Aug. 23–Aug. 28.
“When you take away from the livelihoods of the community, you take away the very vital strength for them to survive. That threat is real,” Guam House of Representatives Vice Speaker Tina Barnes (D-Hagatna) told the House Natural Resources Committee Indo-Pacific Task Force during an Aug. 24 “Peace Through Strength: The Strategic Importance of the Pacific Islands to U.S.-led Global Security” hearing in Tamuning, Guam.
When confronted by South Korean Coast Guard helicopters and ships in the Yellow Sea in November 2011, this swarm of Chinese fishing boats banded together with ropes and bulled into the open sea— behind a shield of Chinese warships. (Dong-a Ilbo/AFP/Getty Images)
U.S. Tripling Maritime Monitoring
The task force hearings were conducted as proposed Compacts of Free Association (COFA) with the FSM, RMI, and Palau await Congressional approval in September.
The pacts, renewed every 20 years, are part of the Biden administration’s “Pacific Partnership Strategy,” which calls for “renewed U.S. engagement across the full Pacific Islands region” to counter China’s efforts “at democratic erosion.”
The administration submitted the proposed compacts to Congress in June after deliberations during the Trump administration stalled with the three freely associated states. The agreements are set to be enacted when the federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
The Biden administration’s proposed compacts earmark $7.1 billion in economic assistance during the two-decade span for the three island nations with $3.3 billion appropriated for FSM, a $1.2 billion increase from its 2003 COFA, and $2.3 billion for RMI, a $1.3 billion increase from its 2003 COFA.
In exchange, the pacts make the island nations strategic allies. The agreements deny area access to Pentagon-decreed adversaries and allow the Department of Defense (DOD) to maintain key installations and operational ranges within their borders.
A key component of the renewed pacts is the United States pledge to assist in policing EEZ waters with a boosted U.S. Coast Guard presence that will include joint operations and “ship rider” programs where marine enforcement officials from host jurisdictions can direct patrols to where violations are suspected.
The pacts triple the United States’ annual commitment for maritime regulatory enforcement to $60 million per year for the next 10 years as part of a June 2022 security memorandum issued by President Joe Biden to “combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing” in the three Pacific island states and U.S. territorial waters.
That $60 million annual effort also boosts the number of FBI agents, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Fisheries agents, forensic auditors, tax investigators, and, of course, attorneys—sea lawyers, literally—to assist the Pacific nations in defending their fisheries on the waters, in the courts, and in the “political war’s” forum of public opinion.
The administration maintains industrial overfishing encourages forced labor, human trafficking, and drug smuggling, and “undermine U.S. economic competitiveness, national security, fisheries sustainability, and the livelihoods and human rights of fishers around the world.”
In a virtual address to the 51st annual Pacific Islands Forum in Suva, Fiji, in June 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris said the United States would assist the island nations in efforts to “invest in marine planning and conservation; and combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; and enhance maritime security,” noting enforcement of maritime pacts such as the South Pacific Tuna Treaty is “a cornerstone of political and economic cooperation” in the region.
Among initiatives launched by the United States is the creation of an IUU (Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated) Fishing Action Alliance with the United Kingdom and Canada to coordinate “urgent action to improve the monitoring, control, and surveillance of fisheries, increase transparency in fishing fleets and in the seafood market, and build new partnerships that will hold bad actors accountable.”
The United States has also established an Interagency Working Group on IUU fishing, comprising 21 federal agencies, to develop five-year plans for protecting fisheries with participating partners from Ecuador, Panama, Senegal, Taiwan, Vietnam, and across the Pacific—all with fisheries episodically besieged by swarms of Chinese fishing boats that ignore most international fishery agreements, demonstrating little concern beyond their daily catch about the long-term sustainability of fisheries.
A Chinese Coast Guard cutter in the East China Sea menacingly lurks behind a flotilla of 230 Chinese fishing boats that swarmed the Japanese-controlled, Chinese-claimed Senkaku Islands in August 2016. (11th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters via AP)
Invisible Armada Of ‘Dark Ships’
Having severely depleted stocks in its own coastal waters, over the last decade, the CCP is dispatching its fishing industry across the oceans of the world, especially off West Africa or Latin America where enforcement is weaker, where national and local governments lack resources or inclination to police waters.
China’s distant-water fishing fleet features A-framed trawlers that slowly pair-net 300-foot wide swathes of the sea, catching more fish in a single sweep than subsistence fishermen catch in a lifetime, or than domestic fishing ships catch in a month.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, there were an estimated 4.1 million commercial fishing vessels on the planet in 2022 with two-thirds registered in Asian nations and 2.5 million capable of distant-water fishing over long distances and times.
While Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Russia are among nations that subsidize domestic commercial distant-water fishing industries, since the dawn of this century, China has built the world’s largest fishing fleet, dwarfing all others.
China is the world’s biggest seafood exporter while consuming more than a third of all fish reported caught each year, according to the United Nations, while harvesting half the world’s annual reported catch.
China’s annual take of the reported global fishery harvest has dramatically increased over the past two decades since the collapse of China’s domestic fishery and South China Sea fish stocks.
During that time, the CCP has amassed a modern, high-tech, industrial armada aided by automation, geospatial satellites, and the exploitative mastery of marine sciences to operate at sea-vacuuming efficiencies, devastating fisheries in its wake.
Estimates on the size of China’s fishing industry vary from 200,000 to 800,000 commercial ships, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations notes, placing its own estimate at 564,000 ships, making it, far and away, the world’s largest.
But fewer than 2,700 of those ships are registered as deep-water fishing-capable, a number the CCP is widely believed to be under-reporting.
The London-based Overseas Development Institute puts China’s distant-fishing fleet closer to 17,000 ships with other monitors offering even higher numbers.
By comparison, the United States’ distant-water fishing fleet has fewer than 300 vessels.
This fleet on paper has been reduced by nearly half since 2013 when there were more than 1 million Chinese fishing vessels operating around the world.
But the fleet on paper is different than the one tha
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