November 16, 2021
China is destroying the world’s fishing ecosystem
By
Uldis Sprogis
Not content with overfishing their own coastline in a non-sustainable way, China has now turned to unethical
pirate fishing in the territorial waters of less powerful nations around the world. Chinese fishermen turn off their GPS transponders that can be traced electronically, send out false electronic signals, violate UN maritime law, enter the sovereign fishing territory of foreign nations, illegally fish with slave-like labor, and then escape to international waters with their catch. Some fishing fleets are so large that they can be seen from space.
For China, world fishing is now like the wild west, with a value in billions of dollars annually; the Chinese have an insatiable appetite for seafood and their population is about 1.4 billion people. They are even risking entering the territorial waters of the US in
Hawaii. Guam and American Samoa may be next. Fishing in pristine
North Western Australia is not only done by China but Indonesia as well, and Australia recently sank 15 Chinese fishing vessels and chased off many others.
The Chinese fish unethically with technologically advanced techniques such as big ocean bed fishing nets, which scoop up most of the sea life and leave the area a devastated sea bed desert with little hope of regeneration for future sea life. They use high intensity stadium lights to attract squid and other sea life before they scoop them up for storage, and transport the catch in refrigerated ships. Hundreds of fishing boats are supplied with fuel from a tanker so that they don’t have to return home to refuel for up to two years and often operate 24/7.
The Chinese fish in poorly patrolled coastal areas like
Western Africa and South America. They returned a second time to fish in the pristine diverse waters of the
Galapagos Islands, thus doing irreparable damage to the wide diversity of rare species in the area. They have returned to the coastal waters of Argentina many times until finally the
US Navy tried to help Argentina and sank 300 fishing boats as punishment for illegal fishing, since the CCP doesn’t fine its fishermen for violating international maritime law. The
Argentine Coast Guard has also sunk illegal Chinese fishing ships.
Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Columbia have banded together to patrol their waters for Chinese fishing aggression, which has no respect for protected or unprotected species.
Closer to China, Indonesia has also fired on and sunk many Chinese
fishing poachers and those of other countries too. The Indonesian Archipelago consists of over 17,000 islands which are very expensive to police and monitor for illegal fishing. The Philippines also repeatedly file
diplomatic protests about militia-armed Chinese fishing boats entering Philippine waters, especially disputed waters in the
South China Sea also claimed by other nations too.