Saving Seafood

US agencies to host webinars on Uyghur forced labor law and the seafood sector

November 8, 2024 — U.S. regulatory agencies will host a series of three webinars in November to discuss the ramifications of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act on the seafood sector.

The webinars come roughly a year after scandalous reports by the Outlaw Ocean Project revealed a litany of labor abuses in China’s seafood industry, including evidence of forced labor by China’s oppressed Uyghur population in seafood supply chains. The reports led to U.S. company’s severing ties with Chinese seafood supplier and increased scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers and regulators.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

China’s Pacific fleet reportedly using squid ship as hospital to evade scrutiny

October 24, 2024 — Lack of transparency is a constant in the Chinese fleet dedicated to squid fishing in South American waters. Turning off their satellite-tracking systems, duplicating their identities within satellite-based monitoring systems, and transshiping their catch onto other vessels without informing the authorities: These are some of the strategies Chinese fishing vessels use to circumvent the law, according to organizations that monitor the fleet’s activities.

This is particularly worrying because several of the vessels that make up this huge fleet have a history of illegal fishing and forced labor.

What happens on board these vessels that operate in shadows?

In an attempt to answer this question, at least partially, Artisonal, a civil society organization based in Chorrillos, Peru, that’s dedicated to monitoring fishing fleets, followed the course of the Zhe Pu Yuan 98. The fishing vessel operates as a makeshift hospital attending to sick crew members from sister ships in the same fleet.

In the last three years, 37 crew members in critical condition and one who died were transferred from Chinese vessels to the Port of Callao on the central coast of Peru. The Zhe Pu Yuan 98 alone transferred 15 of the crew members in critical condition, according to the Artisonal report, which is based on disembarkation records.

A hospital at sea

“The vessel Zhe Pu Yuan 98 was repeatedly entering the Peruvian port, which was rather unusual,” said Eloy Aroni, director of Artisonal. Moreover, all of its entries were so-called forced arrivals, a protocol used when a ship needs to enter a port in an emergency. All this raised the organization’s suspicions.

According to Aroni, in July 2020 a team from The Outlaw Ocean Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit journalism group, confirmed that the Zhe Pu Yuan 98 was being used as a floating hospital for the Chinese fleet of squid vessels operating on the high seas.

“The ship was modified to provide medical assistance to fishermen who operate in the South Pacific. A small operation room was established, and a doctor was brought on board to attend to the sick or injured crew members,” Artisonal wrote in a summary of the report.

However, according to The Outlaw Ocean Project, when the patients’ conditions became critical and the only doctor on board was no longer able to assist them, the patient was transferred to port to be taken to a hospital on land.

Read the full article at Mongabay

Aquaculture Outpaces Wild Catch in China’s Fisheries

September 23, 2024 — The world’s population is due to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and sustainable approaches to feeding the extra mouths are crucial. The fishing sector will play a vital role according to an influential report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In 2022, production reached a record high, driven by a surge in animal aquaculture that exceeded wild catch for the first time, found the latest State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report.

China has played a significant role in this transition. It has been the largest source of fish production since about 1989, for both marine wild catch and aquaculture. By 2022, China accounted for nearly 40% of global output.

But its marine catch declined from 14.4 million tonnes in 2015 to 11.8 million tonnes in 2022, a fall of nearly 18%, the FAO report noted. Meanwhile, with more than a decade of development behind it, China has become the main driver of growth in aquaculture production, not just in Asia, but globally.

Read the full article at The Maritime Executive

US soldiers deployed to Aleutian Islands in response to Chinese, Russian military presence

September 20, 2024 — The U.S. Army has increased its presence in the state of Alaska following increased military activity from Russia and China in and around the U.S. exclusive economic zone (EEZ). At the same time, state and federal officials from Alaska are calling for an increased military investment into the state.

Russia and China began conducting military exercises together in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans on 10 September. In the weeks since, U.S. forces have detected four separate incursions by foreign military aircraft into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone and one instance of a foreign naval vessel entering the U.S. EEZ. These activities follow an instance in July when three Chinese military ships traversed through the U.S. EEZ and were confronted by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

Russian, Chinese fishing vessels barred from US port services

September 13, 2024 — Fishing vessels registered with China, Russia, Mexico and a host of other nations will no longer be able to refuel or resupply at U.S. ports starting next month, federal environmental regulators said this week.

The port denials, issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, come after the agency identified more than a dozen nations with vessels that have engaged in illegal, unreported or unregulated fishing activities — some of which has affected sharks and endangered marine life.

In a statement Tuesday, NOAA said that its decision to pull port privileges for the designated nations is the result of a two-year consultation process with each country.

“We encourage them to address the issues and improve their fisheries management and enforcement practices,” the agency wrote. Because the nations in question failed to take corrective action, NOAA considers them “negatively certified” and revoked port privileges.

Read the full article at the Courthouse News Service

US lawmakers, NGOs continue push against IUU in wake of Outlaw Ocean reporting

September 4, 2024 — A group of U.S. government representatives, including U.S. House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Arizona), and a pair of Canada-based NGOs are pushing the U.S. and Canadian governments to step up enforcement against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing and human rights violations identified in an Outlaw Ocean report.

Outlaw Ocean first published its report on seafood being processed with Uyghur labor in China making its way into U.S. supply chains in October 2023. That report named an array of Chinese companies that allegedly used Uyghur and forced labor when processing seafood.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

New York lobster exporter accused of money laundering, collusion with Chinese government

September 4, 2024 — The owner of Forest Hills, New York, U.S.A.-based seafood company Foodie Fisherman has been charged with money laundering – among other crimes – and his wife, a New York political official, has been charged with taking payoffs in exchange for pursuing actions that benefited China.

On 3 September, Christopher Hu was arrested along with his wife, Linda Sun, who’s accused of acting as an agent of the Chinese government in her earlier role as an aide to former New York Governor Kathy Hochul.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

FiTI report finds large gaps in China’s publicly available fishery data

August 20, 2024 — The transparency of Chinese government data on its fishery sector has come under scrutiny in a new report from the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI), a Seychelles-based nonprofit that aims to strengthen transparency and collaboration in global marine fisheries management.

FiTI is a global multi-stakeholder partnership that monitors the extent to which various governments publish fisheries information online. The organization receives funding through grants from the World Bank, the aid arms of the German and Irish governments, and through philanthropy. The initiative’s biggest funder is the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a U.S. conservation charity.

Read the full article at SeafoodSource

How Chinese Fishing Vessels Dominate Domestic Waters Across the Globe

August 2, 2024 — On March 14, 2016, in the squid grounds off the coast of Patagonia, a rusty Chinese vessel named the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was fishing illegally, several miles inside Argentine waters. Spotted by an Argentine coast-guard patrol and ordered over the radio to halt, the specially-designed squid-fishing ship, known as a “jigger,” fled the scene. The Argentinians gave chase and fired warning shots. The Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 then tried to ram the coast-guard cutter, prompting it to open fire directly on the jigger, which soon sank.

Although the violent encounter at sea that day was unusual, the incursion into Argentine waters by a Chinese squid jigger was not. Owned by a state-run behemoth called the China National Fisheries Company, or CNFC, the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10 was one of several hundred Chinese jiggers that makes annual visits to the high-seas portion of the fishing grounds that lie beyond Argentina’s territory; many of these jiggers then turn off their locational transponders and cross secretly into Argentine waters. Since 2010, the Argentine navy has chased at least 11 Chinese squid vessels out of Argentine waters for suspected illegal fishing, according to the government.

In 2017, a year after the illegal incursion and sinking of the Lu Yan Yuan Yu 10, Argentina’s Federal Fishing Council issued a little-noticed announcement: it was granting fishing licenses to two foreign vessels that would allow them to operate within Argentine waters. Both would sail under the Argentine flag through a local front company, but their true “beneficial” owner was the CNFC. (The CNFC did not respond to requests for comment.)

The move by local authorities may have been a contradiction, but it is an increasingly common one in Argentina—and elsewhere around the world. Over the past three decades, China has gained supremacy over global fishing by dominating the high seas with more than 6,000 distant-water ships, a fleet that is more than triple the size of the next largest national fleet. When it came to targeting other countries’ waters, Chinese fishing ships typically sat “on the outside,” parking in international waters along sea borders, then running incursions across the line into domestic waters. But in recent years, from South America to Africa to the far Pacific, China has increasingly taken a “softer” approach, gaining control from the inside by paying to “flag-in” their ships so they can fish in domestic waters. Subtler than simply entering foreign coastal areas to fish illegally, the tactic is less likely to result in political clashes, bad press, or sunken vessels.

Read the full story at TIME

China distant-water fleet slashes wage bill to stay profitable

July 31, 2024 — China’s distant-water fishing industry is reliant on low-wage labor to buttress poor profitability, according to a report from U.K.-based nonprofit Planet Tracker.

“Fishing Thinking: Solving China’s Distant-Water Challenges,” released 30 July, found the impacts of climate change and a World Trade Organization deal to limit subsidies will force the owners of China’s huge commercial fishing fleet to transition to a more sustainable business model.

Read the full story at SeafoodSource