Oh, Yay. China Issues New Sustainability Rules For Its Fishing Fleet
For years, reports of illegal fishing activities have dogged China’s distant-water fishing fleet. Now, China is significantly tightening regulations governing these vessels for the first time in 17 years, with a slew of new rules taking effect throughout 2020, including harsher penalties for captains and companies found to have broken the law. Estimated at a minimum of 2,900 vessels, the country’s distant-water fleet, active outside its maritime borders, dwarfs that of other nations. Since 2003 it has grown by at least 1,000 boats and doubled its reported annual catch.
The rule changes include revisions to the Distant-Water Fishing Management Regulations, new Management Measures for High Seas Squid Fishery and a new Rule for High Seas Transshipment released earlier this year; as well as a revision to the Administrative Measures of the Vessel Monitoring System released in 2019. They all take effect between January 2020 and January 2021. Leaving less space for illegal activities, the changes are geared toward increasing transparency and promoting more sustainable practices.
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IUU fishing is so pervasive that one in five wild-caught fish is estimated to have been caught illegally, with a total annual value of up to $23.5 billion, according to a 2018 Pew Trust report. China’s distant-water fleet has been widely implicated in illegal practices, ranking worst out of 152 coastal states on a global IUU fishing index developed by U.K.-based Poseidon Aquatic Resource Management and the Geneva-based non-profit Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
February 2019 saw 294 fishing boats making the most of peak squid season in the southwest Atlantic Ocean, just outside Argentina’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Of them, 256 turned off their vessel monitoring system, and 87% of the vessels that did so were flagged to China, according to a 2019 report by Washington, D.C.- based security analyst C4ADS. Dark fleets of Chinese squid boats have also been implicated in $440 million worth of flying squid (Todarodes pacificus) illegally taken from North Korean waters in 2017 and 2018, according to a recent study in the journal Science Advances.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2020/08/china-issues-new-sustainability-rules-for-its-notorious-fishing-fleet/