The dominance and global ubiquity of this fleet raise broader questions about how, why, and at what cost China has put so many boats on the water.
“Without its massive subsidy schemes, China’s distant water fishing fleet would be a fraction of its current size, and most of its South China Sea fleet wouldn’t exist at all,” Poling says. Pauly said, “They also play a major role in depleting fish stocks as they keep vessels operating that would otherwise be decommissioned."
China ranks as having the world’s worst score when it comes to illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, according to an index published last year by Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management, a fishery and aquaculture consulting firm.Still, China is showing small signs of improvement.
“I believe that the Chinese government is serious when they offer to restrict their distant water fleet,” Pauly says. “Whether they can enforce the planned restrictions onto their fleet is another question; indeed, I don’t believe they control their distant-water fleets any more than we control ours in the West.”
“Catching large amounts of wild fish to feed a growing demand for farmed fish makes little sense,” Sala says. “A fraction of those wild fish could instead be used to feed people directly, with less impact on ocean life.” More than 200 of these militia fishing boats occupy the waters around the South China Sea’s disputed Spratly Islands—an area rich with fish, and possibly oil and natural gas too—to which China, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan lay claim. Satellite imagery shows that the Chinese fishing boats in the area spend most of their time anchored close together in clusters and are not actually fishing.
In sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to fish in these banned waters, China has been violently displacing smaller North Korean vessels and spearheading a decline in once-abundant squid stocks.
Can China please just eat fucking hotdogs like the rest of us
I see a cat
what a surprise! 😡
CTVAtlantic ian_urbina It's the Chinese mooch ships....man the torpedo stations....
ian_urbina realDonaldTrump
ian_urbina Fck China.