(no title)
dementis | 3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone
"China has by far the largest distant water fleet in the world with at least 3,000 vessels, some of which have been spotted off the coasts of Africa and as far as Ecuador. This has raised concerns of overfishing at a time when global fish stocks are plummeting. “It’s their strategy of establishing themselves as a big fishing power,” said Matti Kohonen, executive director of the FTC. “Then they end up breaking a lot of fishing laws by doing that."
https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2022/10/26/Chinese-fi...
The issue with a lot of places globally that Chinese owned fishing fleets(of highly questionable legal status) go is that they will decimate the area like a plague of locus and then just like locus they will move on once there is no longer any viable marine wildlife to catch(or even kelp / sea grass to collect). And the local governments either don't have the resources required to patrol their coastal exclusive economic zone or they intentionally don't want to antagonize China by stopping their illegal fishing fleets either because of political corruption or due to other more serious reasons.
Technically the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) can enforce Maritime law but I am not aware of them doing anything about illegal fishing fleets.
dirtyid|3 years ago
PRC has largest absolute DWF fleet size, but per capita she's underfishing, especially relative to TW and SKR, and behind TW, SKR, JP in terms of transhipping. Ultimately PRC with relatively small EEZ due to geography is naturally going to fish in the "commons" which she's entitled to, and even then she's still extracting less than her proportionate amount relative to population vs other actors.
>The issue
The issue is:
1) international system can't get shit together to legislate against subsidies to harm their own industries, including western nations like Europe, who also fishes illegally off Africa. There's no reason for PRC make herself less competitive unless there's global agreement.
2) bluntly PRC distant fishing drama is US driven propaganda to rationalize sending US coast guards to enforce against PRC interests. Which she did as new lawfare initiative right after these conveniently timed articles seeded narrative into MSM. But curiously not against the other DWF fleets like TW, SKR, JP that also behaves poorly but are incidentally also instruments US use against PRC interests.
For reference, for PRC's DWF fleet to match other top DWF fleet's capita fishing efforts, she would have to fish 3x more to match JP, 7x more to match SKR and Spain, 30X more to match TW. Unless you think PRC fishermen and citizens shouldn't have the same opportunities or access to seafood. They're certainly getting their disprortionate share of western media hit pieces and biased US enforcement efforts.