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The steel-hulled fishing boat arrived as early as abroad South Pacific Its people have their own system to share the catches of the ocean.
In the Tokelau colony of New Zealand in the middle of the region, 1,400 people living on its three atolls practiced a anger, To ensure that every household has fish.
Several times a month, all people on the atolls have time to prepare and bait lines, while the “white hair” (known as the leader) uses the traditional knowledge of the best farms and the tides and waves to determine target fish, including tuna and Sturgeon. Moon phases. They set off in the middle of the night and returned after 12 hours, when the sun had risen. Then their catch is classified into different species and sizes. Bigger families get a bigger share.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, traditional fishing activities like this are carried out at the same time as large-scale commercial fishing activities. In these activities, the catch is not always shared so fairly or disclosed so transparently.
The Pacific region exported 530,000 metric tons of seafood in 2019, with a net value of US$1.2 billion. The largest exporters are Papua New Guinea (US$470 million), Fiji (US$182 million), the Federated States of Micronesia (US$130 million), Vanuatu (108 million U.S. dollars) and Solomon Islands (101 million U.S. dollars). The largest importer of Pacific fish in 2019 is Thailand, with seafood imported from the Pacific worth 300 million U.S. dollars, the Philippines (195 million U.S. dollars), Japan (130 million U.S. dollars), China (100 million U.S. dollars) and the United States (100 million U.S. dollars).
In some respects, fisheries is a success story in the Pacific. At a milestone in regional cooperation in 1982, eight countries signed the Nauru Agreement, which allowed small countries to collectively negotiate the entry of foreign fishing vessels into their waters, an initiative that increased revenues by US$500 a year. .
But the Pacific Ocean-the world’s most fertile fishing ground, which supplies more than half of the world’s tuna-has also become a victim of illegal fishing, with as many as one-fifth of the wild fish caught illegally.
The small Pacific countries that carried out these illegal fishing operations in their waters have lost profits, suffered from resource depletion, and are unable to fully monitor their waters. They are often caught by fishery importers for failing to guarantee a sustainable source.
How fishing works
The 17 countries and territories in the region directly control their territorial waters. fishing Outside the territorial waters, in the country’s larger exclusive economic zone (EEZ), it is supervised and coordinated by the Intergovernmental Forum Fisheries Bureau. The Pacific Exclusive Economic Zone produces approximately US$26 billion worth of tuna for consumers, but the income of these islands accounts for only about 10% of that value. Only a few Pacific countries deal with any catch in their waters-this usually happens in Bangkok and other Asian cities. Pacific countries rarely even provide crews for fishing boats, and only earn money by obtaining permits.
The high seas outside the exclusive economic zone are unclaimed and are under the jurisdiction of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) of many countries.
In 2019, WCPFC’s total tuna production reached a record 2,961,059 tons, accounting for 81% of the total Pacific tuna production and 55% of the global tuna production.It is dominated by vessels from deep-water fishing countries, including China, Japan, South Korea and the United States.
After the Second World War, industrial-scale fishing began in the South Pacific. It is dominated by the United States and Japan, but in the past two decades, China has sent waves of fishing boats, mainly longline and seine fishing boats.
The fishing line of longline anglers is 100 kilometers long, and each fishing line has a maximum of 3,000 hooks. They use electronic devices to find a school of fish, and then use the speed of the boat to drag the line past it.
A careful captain avoids killing sharks, long-billed fish (such as marlins and swordfish), turtles and seabirds in the process. Others don’t care. Few longline tuna boats in the Pacific have independent observers. Because they are small and usually dangerous, few people are willing to sail on them.
Purse seine boats are larger and more comfortable—attract observers—and use airborne helicopters and floating gathering equipment to attract tuna. The purse seine will surround the school with a small boat net (“purse”), then close the net and catch all the fish-usually dolphins and sharks.
China enters
Due to severe overfishing of its own regional waters, especially the China Sea, the Chinese fleet is now catching large amounts of tuna from the most fertile fishing grounds in the world. Since 2012, China’s Pacific fishing fleet has increased by more than 500%.
A 2016 survey of ships sailing in the Pacific found that the number of ships flying the Chinese flag far exceeds that of any other country. At that time, China had 290 industrial ships approved to operate in the region, accounting for more than a quarter of the total, more than 240 ships from all Pacific countries combined.
Their longline fishing fleet targets albacore and yellowfin tuna and dominates the exclusive economic zones of Vanuatu and the high seas. Silk sharks and whitetip sharks are the most popular “bycatch”, their fins are preserved, and the rest are discarded.
For the past 10 years, China and Hong Kong have been trying to shut down the shark fin trade, partly because of prohibiting the consumption of shark fin soup in government activities and publicly stigmatizing it through public efforts. The continued decline in the number of marine sharks shows that the success to date has been limited.
According to WCPFC’s records, of the 1,300 foreign-operated vessels approved to fish in the area, China has more than 600 vessels.
Earlier this year, China stated that it had banned its fleet from fishing squid in the Atlantic and Pacific for three months to help the population recover. State-run newspaper “Global Times” Reported that the move highlights “The image of China as a responsible fishery nation is a milestone in China’s participation in international ocean management.”
Miren Gutierrez, an assistant researcher at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London, co-authored a research report on China’s deep-sea fishing.
“Encouraged by the exhaustion of fish resources in domestic waters and subsidies, China’s ocean fishing fleet is getting farther and farther, and its companies are building more and more ships to meet the growing demand for seafood,” she said.
Various estimates of the Chinese fleet are between 1,600 and 3,400 vessels, but ODI research shows that this number may be five to eight times higher.
The author identified 12,490 vessels observed outside the internationally recognized Chinese waters between 2017 and 2018.
“China is a fishing superpower,” the study said. “It has the largest fishing fleet and the largest DWF [distant water fishing] Fleet in the world. “
Chinese vessels are widely documented for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities. In January of this year, the Brookings Institution, headquartered in Washington, published a research report, quoting industry, regulatory agencies, and the media as saying: “Chinese fishing activities present a truly unique and terrifying IUU threat.”
The report, written by Michael Sinclair, a fellow of the Brookings Institution and former US Coast Guard Captain, claims that China has used the world’s largest fishing fleet to play a “destructive role” to satisfy its population’s demand for protein. Huge demand.
“When working together in a fleet, these ships are greedy,” Sinclair wrote.
At the beginning of last year, when Ecuador claimed that at least 150 Chinese fishing boats had closed the tracking system so that they could Operating near the Galapagos IslandsIn response, the Chinese Fisheries Administration announced in April last year that it would start blacklisting vessels and captains found to be engaged in IUU fishing. Beijing has banned some vessels flying its flag from violating IUU violations in the Pacific region, but industry observers question the effectiveness of this move, especially because Chinese ships continue to be blind and closed for tracking in the Pacific region.
In the Pacific, most of the suspected IUUs are in the unreported column, which is the result of a combination of illegal transfers on the high seas (when the catch is transferred between ships) and corruption or careless monitoring of Pacific ports.
Although China is the most cited IUU fisherman, other countries, especially South Korea and Vanuatu, have also been mentioned. Even if the small Pacific countries are lawbreakers, IUU fishing is still an ongoing problem.
Various studies have attempted to add value to IUU catches.A kind 2019 report The World Resources Institute estimates that as many as 7.2 million tons of IUU fish disappear every year, valued at between US$4.3 billion and US$8.3 billion.
The massive fish losses caused by IUU fishing have long consumed the economies of small countries without any other export products and harmed the global environment. The inability of Pacific countries to deal with illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing has aroused the anger of wealthy importers who seek certification of the legality of the fish.
The European Union issued a warning to Vanuatu in 2012 about the role of IUU ships flying its flag. Facing the prospect of the EU’s export ban, Vanuatu reformed its regulations and was formally informed in 2016 that the warning had been lifted.
But the country then found itself in trouble with the United States because a group of apparently Taiwan-owned ships hoisted the Vanuatu flag, including a ship named Tunago 61.
In 2016, six Indonesian crew members of Tunago 61 murdered the captain while fishing east of Pitcairn Island. They put the body in the refrigerator and then took it to Suva, Fiji, Where they confessed the crime. They said that they had worked without pay for 16 months and had not disembarked.
Because the ship was flying the Vanuatu flag, Fiji took these people to Vanuatu, a country they had never been to, where they were convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison. They are still sitting in the cell there.
Transform Aqorau, the Solomon Islands’ ambassador to the United States, who is responsible for promoting the parties to the Nauru Agreement, believes that IUU fishing is one of the greatest threats to fisheries management in developing countries. The convenience signs of tax havens and the operation of shell companies obscure what is happening.
“Most developing countries do not have the ability to verify the information provided by these ships,” Aqorau said.
As a result, poorer Pacific countries often suffer substantial income losses due to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, especially because it usually involves traditional fishing grounds. “Therefore, the loss of developing countries is not only reflected in the economic aspects of paying lower license fees, but also in terms of resources, which is reflected in easier access to resources.”
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