China is destroying the world's fishing ecosystem

By Uldis Sprogis

 

Not content with overfishing its 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 U.N. 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 U.S. in Hawaii.  Guam and American Samoa may be next.  Fishing in pristine North Western Australia is done not only by China, but by Indonesia as well, and Australia recently sank fifteen 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 they transport the catch in refrigerated ships.  Hundreds of fishing boats are supplied with fuel from a tanker so 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 U.S. 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 Colombia have banded together to patrol their waters for Chinese fishing aggression, which has no respect for protected or unprotected species.

 

China ships block Philippine boats

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. 

 

 

 

Another technique that is used is registering fishing boats within a corrupt poor country like Ghana, hiring some local fishing crew with Chinese supervisors, fishing in the territorial waters of Ghana under a Ghanaian flag, and exporting the catch.

 

I obviously can't help but bump into products manufactured in China, which I sometimes reluctantly buy, but I draw the line on buying unethically fished assorted seafood from China, which was being sold in a major U.S. supermarket about two months ago.  It seems that Chinese businessmen will do anything, even if it means selling the stolen sea life of other nations for a profit.  The Chinese people are currently suffering from national food shortages, so you would think the CCP would classify feeding its own people as the highest priority, but the communists don't seem to care that much and even sell pirated seafood to other nations.

 

 

 

The CCP may be feared by many nations, but its thieving tactics means that it is no longer truly respected as a nation by most countries in the world, especially those with ocean coastlines whose ecosystems are being destroyed systematically with unsustainable fishing.  The CCP reputation as a law-abiding government is in the toilet for all practical purposes worldwide.

 

Source: American Thinker