In welcome news, President Guillermo Lasso of Ecuador has announced an expansion of the Galapagos marine reserve. With an additional 23,000 square miles, the total Galapagos protection zone will stand at nearly 75,000 square miles.
It follows years of Chinese overfishing in and around the Galapagos.
Ecuador last year monitored a huge Chinese fleet as it trawled the ocean near the Galapagos. But while Lasso has pledged to ensure the zone is protected, Ecuador’s means of doing so are limited. Its defense budget is falling, and its warfare fleet is small, consisting of older vessels. And while Lasso says that Xi Jinping has assured him that China will respect Ecuador’s maritime exclusion zones, Xi’s disdain for the truth makes that pledge worthless. Indeed, we need look no further than Xi’s patent deception on carbon emissions reduction. The Chinese leader couldn’t even be bothered to attend the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
Regardless, the Galapagos concern is just one element of a much broader crisis.
Reflecting an extension of China’s military imperialism in the East and South China seas, China annually deploys tens of thousands of fishing vessels on global dredging operations. Pacific South American, West African, and South East Asian nations have been particularly afflicted by this blight. But China doesn’t care. Driven by a voracious appetite for squid and other delicacies valued by its middle class, the Chinese fleets are figuratively and literally gutting the oceans.
The Associated Press’s Joshua Goodman recently conducted a deep dive into the concern, showing how catastrophic the situation is becoming.
Goodman noted that “between November 2020 and May 2021, a total of 523 mostly Chinese fishing vessels — 35% more than the previous season — were detected just beyond the boundary of Argentina’s 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone, according to satellite data analyzed by Windward, a maritime intelligence firm. Of that amount, 42% had turned off at least once their safety transponders. Meanwhile, 188 of those same vessels showed up near the Galapagos, including 14 Chinese vessels that went offline in both oceans for an average 34 hours each time.”
This is how the Chinese operate: breaking international maritime law by deactivating their transponders so as to hide their numbers and nationality. This allows Beijing a plausible deniability that its vessels are responsible.
Something has to change. Either the world starts taking action, if necessary with force, to stop this fish genocide. Or China will do to the oceans what it is doing to the Uyghurs: kill them off.
