'Our oceans need protection, not China's reckless fishing'
ARGENTINA
Saturday, June 12, 2021, 06:00 (GMT + 9)
Oceana published a new report that has Argentina as the protagonist. The behavior of 800 vessels that operated on our maritime border was analyzed. In three years, they detected 600,000 hours of fishing with the AIS system turned off, a behavior that would be associated with entering our waters and transshipments on the high seas.
Oceana created in 2014 Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting ocean governance with greater transparency, working in partnership with Google. At first it was possible to see live the trajectories of more than 140,000 ships and investigate where they had been during the last year. In recent years, it has entered into agreements with universities, scientific institutes and countries to strengthen the data source and carry out studies based on the documentation collected.
Through the use of this tool, last year WFG and the University of California managed to make a map of forced labor on board ships in international waters and have recently published a new report that addresses precisely what happens to ships in the fleet. foreigners operating on the edge of our Exclusive Economic Zone.
This time, the fishing boats that have turned off the monitoring system (AIS) on the Argentine maritime border from January 1, 2018 to April 25 of this year, were counted. A direct relationship was also established between vessels turning off monitoring and approaching other vessels, in what could be a maneuver to conceal transshipment on the high seas, identified by FAO as a feature of IUU fishing.
Oceana documented more than 800 foreign vessels that registered more than 900,000 total hours of apparent fishing. The analysis also revealed that 69% of this fishing activity was carried out by more than 400 Chinese vessels. Compared with foreign fleets, Argentine vessels in the same period caught 1% of the total, the report indicates. As was the case in the forced labor report, jigger vessels were singled out as protagonists.
“Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing threatens the health of the oceans. Vessels that disappear along the edge of Argentina's national waters could be illegally looting its waters” said Oceana's Deputy Vice President for US Campaigns, Beth Lowell.
As part of this analysis, Oceana documented more than 6,000 events in which AIS transmissions were not transmitted for more than 24 hours,“these ships were invisible for more than 600,000 hours in total, hiding the location and masking potentially illegal behavior, such as crossing into the national waters of Argentina to fish ”, the document states verbatim.
They claim that the Chinese fleet was responsible for 66% of these incidents, which could be related to illegal activities. It emerges from the report that "Korean, Spanish and Taiwanese vessels carried out 26% of the fishing activity, with about 200 vessels fishing for approximately 251,000 hours" and they highlight that "Spanish vessels spent almost twice as long with AIS devices turned off than visibly fishing ”.
Another of the behaviors observed was the approach to another ship coinciding with the cancellation of the AIS transmission, a fact that occurred in 56% of the ships that would have turned off the system. This could be due to the fact that they are resupplying food and fuel on the high seas or making transshipments to transfer their catches to refrigerated cargo ships.
Phto: Prefectura Naval Argentina
As is well expressed in the document, transshipment at sea can be a weak link in the seafood supply chain, which could allow illegally caught fish to mix with legal catch.
In this regard, Beth Lowell said that“a recent study found that the United States imported an estimated value of 2.4 billion dollars in seafood derived from IUU fishing in 2019. The United States can take measures to address IUU fishing by requiring that all imports of seafood have documentation of capture that demonstrates that you were caught legally, implementing traceability of the chain, and making transparency an import condition ”.
Regarding the port to which the ships that turned off the monitoring system went, Oceana once again identifies Uruguay as one of the main destinations.“Of the vessels with AIS gaps, 31% of them visited the Port of Montevideo, Uruguay, at the end of their trip. This port has supposedly been favored by vessels carrying out illegal activities, ”the report wrote.
"Our oceans need protection, not the reckless fishing of China and other distant water fleets," said Marla Valentine, director of Oceana's Illegal Fishing and Transparency Campaign.“This is just one example of how unregulated distant water fishing fleets can take advantage of the lack of transparency and enforcement at sea. It is becoming increasingly clear that the interests of Chinese commercial fishing are far-reaching and borderless; the world cannot afford to ignore the massive impacts of fleets like this on our oceans. The constant use of AIS devices on all fishing vessels is essential for transparency at sea and traceability in the seafood supply chain ", she concluded.
Oceana's contribution contributes to making visible with general data the behavior of the foreign fleet in the South Atlantic and to continue establishing patterns of behavior of those who would carry out illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in international waters, where Olympic and predatory fishing, associated with human exploitation is the rule that governs it.
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Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing threatens the health of the oceans. Vessels that disappear along the edge of Argentina's national waters could be illegally looting its waters” 
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"Our oceans need protection, not the reckless fishing of China and other distant water fleets," .jpg)
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