Chinese fleet depredating the seas again located off Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Shun Xing 18 industrial fishing vessel has reached the southern part of the archipelago, as denounced by the Más Galapagos project.

A huge fleet of Chinese fishing vessels is once again stalking the Galapagos Islands. The Más Galapagos project, dedicated to the protection and conservation of the archipelago’s marine reserve, on Tuesday denounced that the first Chinese industrial fishing boat named Shun Xing 18 has settled south of the islands.

“We ask for specific actions to ensure that they do not enter the island’s exclusive economic zone,” the group stated on their social networks, in which they also mentioned the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso.

Eliecer Cruz, spokesman for Más Galapagos, said that Global Fish Watch is monitoring the path of the Chinese vessels, which are currently in international waters.

“The bulk of the fleet is about 400 kilometers west of the archipelago, it is still quite far away, but this fleet operates by sending one or two boats ahead and once they find the squid shoals they call the other vessels and the whole fleet comes closer,” Cruz said, according to Ecuadorian newspaper El Comercio.

“The authorities have a hard task, we are going to continue monitoring the route of these vessels,” he added.

Environment Minister Gustavo Manrique told the newspaper that the fleet is outside the 200-mile limit of Ecuadorian waters. He also cautioned that in case of transgression in the country’s economic zone, there will be sanctions.

“We have protocols, fast displacement ships, we have an agreement with the Government of Canada to detect when they try to turn off their navigation equipment in order not to be monitored, this has been acquired a month ago, everything is monitored to prevent these ships from entering,” the Ecuadorian official assured.

He also pointed out that the Government has been monitoring the situation in the country’s waters since the beginning: “We have been working since day one with the Ministry of Defense, with the Secretariat of Communication, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Production in satellite monitoring, including aerial surveillance, to ensure that these ships will not enter Ecuadorian territory.”

Cruz recalled that last year the presence of a Chinese fleet with up to 300 vessels was reported. In this context, he called on the Foreign Ministry and the National Navy to redouble their efforts to prevent Chinese fishing vessels from entering the country’s economic zone.

In August 2020, the Ecuadorian Navy denounced that 149 out of some 325 vessels, mostly Chinese flagged, had turned off their satellite tracking and communication system to evade the monitoring of their fishing activities around the archipelago, in violation of global fishing activity agreements (RFMOs).

Ex-Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Luis Gallegos reported that the foreign fishing fleet, predominantly of Chinese origin, had moved from the Exclusive Economic Zone surrounding the Galapagos Islands to northern Peru.

Following the accusations, the Chinese embassy in Ecuador assured that its vessels “strictly” comply with conservation measures and denied that any Chinese vessels have been engaged in illegal fishing.

However, the constant maneuvers of Chinese fleets have put Xi Jinping’s regime at the heart of controversy.

“The sheer size and aggressiveness of this fleet against marine species is a major threat to the balance of Galapagos marine species,” ex-Environment Minister Yolanda Kakabadse told The Guardian in an interview at the time.

Galapagos – a World Heritage Site, according to the United Nations – which has one of the richest ecosystems in biodiversity on the planet, is in danger. “As we go on the cruises we have seen that on the beaches of remote places there are many Chinese bottles,” remarked Natali Constante, a guide on the island. She also told local media that even sharks – many of which are monitored by GPS – “are moving farther and farther away.”

“After depleting fish stocks in domestic waters and encouraged by subsidies, China’s offshore fishing fleets have been traveling increasingly far, and its companies have been building more vessels to meet the growing demand for seafood,” Miren Gutierrez, a research associate at the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) told Voice of America. The institute counted some 17,000 Chinese vessels fishing worldwide.

Towards the end of April last year, Argentina’s Coast Guard was also forced to act in reaction to the mobilization of Chinese vessels plundering the Argentine seabed.

The Chinese regime announced in recent hours that it will temporarily ban its fishing fleet, the largest in the world, from catching squid in some parts of the Pacific and Atlantic where overfishing has brought these populations to the brink of extinction.

China catches up to 70% of the world’s squid and its vessels reach as far as West Africa and Latin America to satiate the country’s appetite for seafood.

But Chinese vessels will suspend operations in the main squid spawning grounds in the southwest Atlantic near Argentina from Thursday through September 30, and in parts of the Pacific from September through November, the Ministry of Agriculture announced Monday. The ban comes in the wake of international backlash against China’s giant offshore fleet, accused of overfishing and damaging fragile marine ecosystems.

The areas covered by the ban are nursery grounds for two of the most popular squid varieties: the Argentine shortfin squid and the Humboldt squid.

Stocks of Argentine shortfin squid have been low in recent years. The average catch by Chinese vessels in the southwest Atlantic averaged only 50 tons in 2019, compared with up to 2,000 tons before, according to China’s squid fishing association.

“China is the world’s largest consumer of squid and the depleting catch has left decision-makers worried,” said Zhou Wei, a marine ecosystem conservationist at Greenpeace China. He added: “Ensuring a stable supply of seafood is important to ensure food security.”

China’s distant-water fishing fleet counts more than 2,600 vessels, over 10 times that of the United States. Nearly one-third is engaged in squid fishing.

“A ban on squid fishing–albeit temporary–by China is critical to the health of the ocean, given the large size of the catch,” said Zhang Jihong, a marine biologist with China’s Yellow Sea Fisheries Research Institute.

China’s fishing industry employs more than 14 million people, and another 30 million depend on fish for their livelihoods. But as stocks are depleted at home, Chinese fishermen are sailing further away and have become embroiled in maritime disputes.

Illegal fishing constitutes the 6th most lucrative criminal economy globally, with estimated revenues of between US$15 billion and US$36 billion, according to a 2017 report by Global Financial Integrity. China’s fishing fleet, with nearly 17,000 vessels, by far the largest in the world, is at the center of this problem, with China listed as the worst-ranked country for illegal fishing in a 2019 Global Initiative report.

Although it had been a long-standing problem, China’s fishing fleet became a particular concern after 2016. Since then, it has prompted serious annual alerts in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina. In Chile alone, illegal fishing represents an estimated annual cost of US$300 million to the country, according to AthenaLab’s 2020 report.

In Ecuador, environmental concerns have become pressing after 2017, following the case of the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999, a vessel intercepted inside the UNESCO-protected Galapagos Marine Reserve with more than 300 tons of sharks on board, including hammerheads, an endangered species.

Last year, faced with increasing actions by Chinese fleets, the U.S. Coast Guard mobilized the USCGC Bertholf to support the Ecuadorian Navy’s patrols around the EEZ. At the time, U.S. Admiral Karl Schultz, Coast Guard Commandant, argued that illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing has become the highest priority for maritime security, ahead of counter-narcotics and counter-piracy.

Source: Infobae