Overfishing, secret signals and crew abuse: Report by British group details violations aboard Chinese vessels
A British watchdog says China’s distant-water squid vessels underreport catches, overfish, harm protected species and subject migrant crews to severe abuse.
Squids are caught in the Atlantic OceanENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE FOUNDATION
China's distant-water squid fleet, the largest in the world, is facing growing international criticism over accusations that it underreports catches, overfishes the world's oceans and hauls in protected species such as whale sharks.
A report released this month by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), a British environmental and human rights group, lays out the case in detail, drawing on five years of research and more than 430 interviews with Indonesian and Filipino crew who worked aboard 249 distant-water vessels.
China reported about 38 percent of the world's squid catch to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2023, but the EJF estimates its real share of squid taken from international waters runs far higher, at 50 to 70 percent. The group accuses the fleet of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, known as IUU fishing, across the world's oceans.
In the Indian Ocean, the estimated catch based on vessels' Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals ran about four times higher than what China reported to the FAO. The fleet logged some 41,000 metric tons of squid there in 2023 without properly identifying the species or the areas fished, the report said.
The EJF expects the pattern holds in other squid grounds. Across the three biggest squid fisheries, the northwest Indian Ocean, southwest Atlantic and southeast Pacific, which collectively supply 60 percent of the world's squid, China's officially reported catch came to 663,000 tons, or 22 percent of the global total. Most of that fishing takes place on the high seas beyond any country's jurisdiction, where fleets are supposed to report their activities and haul to their home government and the relevant regional fisheries management organization.
The report was not only about China. Of the 249 vessels surveyed, 70 percent were Chinese-flagged, 16 percent Taiwanese and 14 percent South Korean, with all three accused of violations. Seoul committed in December to investigate earlier findings on overfishing by the foundation and tighten monitoring.
To stay out of sight, the report says, vessels now transfer their catch to refrigerated ships at sea and keep fishing, a practice that disguises how much they take. Nearly all crew members interviewed described such transfers, and the EJF found a recurring pattern of boats switching off their AIS transponders or faking their signals.
The report also describes rampant forced labor, drawn from crew interviews, with 25 suspected deaths on 20 Chinese squid boats, at least nine of them believed to be cases of beriberi, a disease caused by a severe vitamin B1 deficiency.
"Our first few months were hard, we were treated like pigs. They give us leftover food. Other crews were beaten," one Filipino crew member said. "We used seawater for drinking and bathing. The bread, noodles and milk were all expired,"
A giant manta ray caught by a squid fleet in the Indian Ocean sits on the deck of a vessel.EFJ
An Indonesian crew member recalled a colleague who had beriberi.
"The captain kept telling them to work, so they couldn't rest. They were given only medicine unrelated to the illness, their condition worsened, and they died in the end," the crew member said.
The fleet also kills internationally protected species, including dolphins, giant manta rays and whale sharks, the report found. In the northwest Indian Ocean, where the interviewed crew members served on Chinese vessels, 62 percent of boats were reported to have sliced off fins — prized for dishes such as shark-fin soup — before dumping the bodies back into the sea.
"Once their numbers fall, these marine animals can take decades to recover," the EJF warned. One Indonesian crew member who worked on a Chinese vessel said the crew caught a seal and took its teeth.
"Sometimes, they cut it open, and its liver was eaten," the crew member said, directly implicating the vice-boatswain and the Chinese crew members.
"There's no getting around the fact that you can see the Chinese long-distance fishing fleet from space," said James Bates, executive secretary of the Falkland Islands Fishing Companies Association. "We are crying out for a regional fisheries management organization that will include the likes of Great Britain, Argentina and the Falklands that puts politics aside."
China's squid fleet has caused trouble in North Korean waters before, too. In 2020, the nonprofit Global Fishing Watch reported, based on satellite analysis, that 700 to 900 Chinese squid vessels had swept up catches in the East Sea between 2017 and 2019, taking more than 160,000 tons of squid in 2017 and 2018 alone, as much as South Korea and Japan's combined annual catch. The fishing has been blamed for the East Sea's shrinking squid stocks.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
