A simple first step would be a global ban on bottom trawling. No exceptions at all.
It's like if you harvested deer by dragging chain saw wire and tumbling grapples through a forest between two giant bulldozers, killing every other living thing in between. Most bottom trawling wouldn't happen without subsidies and tax breaks on fuel.
They wouldn’t care if they wanted to do it. Read that article about the Soviets slaughtering huge numbers of whales for no reason and misreporting the numbers to the international community. Whistle blowers eventually told the world so that the science would make sense, that’s how many whales were just missing.
Feels like you're missing the entire point of this piece. "International Law" isn't real if nobody enforces it and China knows this very well. They're playing a different game.
China is sensitive about how the rest of the world views it. They'll ignore a law if it's not a big embarrassment. But if we make them lose face over it, make them look unsuited to be a global leader if they continue, they'll change behavior.
As Noah's piece points out, they clearly do not care about this issue as they're already blatantly ignoring international and regional law because they recognize accurately that the court of global populist public opinion is the only one that matters for the purpose of face saving.
As with most issues, activist groups are extremely reluctant to criticize or hold accountable any group other than Western states. More importantly, the political and propaganda climate (surely driven in no small part by Chinese efforts like TikTok etc.) mean that it is very easy to mobilize huge amounts of global anger / outrage etc at the USA, or Europeans actors for environmental issues but essentially impossible to do so against a non-Western country like China.
China knows it can get away with murder and does so often. They couldn't care less unless global populist opinion changes. The closest they've come to dropping the ball on this was COVID but even in that case they managed to turn reasonable, science-and-intelligence backed theories like the lab leak hypothesis into fringe, partisan conspiracies.
Personally, my belief is that activist groups know that more authoritarian or non-western governments would just ignore them and they actually would barely have an impact or attention, so they go to the places where they can feel morally superior, safe and also impact policy a little bit. I dunno, but it definitely is harder to go after the people that are the real baddies and they don't seem to care about that fight.
China lost in the International Court on their claims in the South China Sea. There has been zero change in their claims or policy. They will look unsuited to be a global leader? Perhaps true in the eyes of those who hold values that the Chinese government ignores.
It seems privateers would be a great solution here. Sovereign nations can grant licenses to people to seize and sell illegal fishing vessels in their territorial water, even is the state doesn't have the resources to seize the ships themselves.
My friend Jack is very keen on this solution. In a private email to me he wrote: 'Ahh, Jim lad! Shiver me timbers! Economic incentives for privateering, that's the way to address the problem of Chinese over-fishing of international waters'.
I do not think this is very promising because the Chinese would have a legal and moral right to respond with armed force against the privateers and their host country. I do not think any countries, even the United States, are prepared to do that over fishing rights.
Would China actually have a legal right to respond with armed force against, say, Chile if Chile seized Chinese vessels illegally fishing in Chile's territorial waters? That doesn't seem likely to me. Countries have a right to enforce their laws in their territory. It seems to me that a military response would constitute an act of war by China.
Of course, China might well respond forcefully in other ways.
That would certainly apply to Chilean law-enforcement in Chilean territorial waters and I think exclusive economic zone.
I am not confident that Chile can subcontract that out to private parties. In particular, if a private ship comes up to your fishing boat and tries to board you, I think you have a good claim to use force to repel them. And to ask your navy for assistance in doing so.
A navy entering another nation's territorial waters to repel that nation's authorized representatives seems like an act of war to me. It definitely wouldn't qualify as Innocent Passage.
However, pretty much every western nation is a signatory to the 1856 Declaration of Paris, in which they formally abolished privateering, so they'd probably have to use a different mechanism. Perhaps they could deputize private individuals as law enforcement.
We are going to go to war with China sooner or later. Get a working large scale Ballistic Missile Defense system, then provoke a war. As part of the surrender terms, require them to stop fishing. We can also destroy their fishing fleet.
The ongoing PRC-Philippines conflict in the South China Sea can provide a picture of how these situations play out. I agree that deputizing privateers and granting them the catch as payment would be a good place to start.
Quibble in the first part: the ozone layer CFCs/HFCs seems like a really bad example there. The Montreal Protocol was massively successful and required substantial international cooperation. It’s not like investments in HFCs which eventually made them cheaper happened idiosyncratically.
Today's article, "China is killing the fish," was courageous, high-caliber journalism. Not too long ago, piracy on the seas was common. This is similar. Governments of the world do have a responsibility outside their sovereign borders. After all, this Earth is our common home, and it should be a collective concern to sustain its health for future generations.
This is important and well-known to those of us who follow such issues.
It's even worse than you think. China wants to harvest krill from the Antarctic. Krill are the foundation of the marine food chain. Allowing this will kill off many or most marine animals.
I first stumbled across this oceanic plunder in the pages of The Economist years ago, but Noah's latest dispatch delivers the knockout punch: fresh data, stark hypocrisy, and an urgent call to stop pretending this isn't happening.
Reading it, though, I can't shake the image of Independence Day—those colossal alien ships hovering over our planet, methodically stripping every resource without a flicker of concern for the locals getting in the way. Swap the extraterrestrials for Beijing's armada of subsidized trawlers, and the script feels eerily familiar: harvest everything, leave devastation in your wake, and call it progress. The only difference? These 'aliens' are very much from Earth—and they're not even trying to hide the invasion anymore.
Time to decide whether we keep watching the blockbuster unfold... or start fighting back before the credits roll on global fisheries.
Having crossed Chinese fishing boats in other countries territorial waters personally, this is absolutely true: Running dark (transponders off), truly dark (navigation lights off!), trailing 6 mile long fish lines, not answering radio calls on international hailing channels...
That said, I remember closing on the PNW coast in 1977. A vast sea of lights, exactly outside the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone of the US. A Russian fishing fleet with a factory processing mother ship.
And now, Trump opens up the only Marine National Monument in Atlantic to commercial fishing.
A few clarifications, points of agreement, and broader context, based on leading research at Global Fishing Watch over the past decade:
China's fleet actually isn't getting bigger. It looks like the domestic fleet is shrinking and the distant water fleet is somewhat steady in size or maybe slightly decreasing. That does not mean it's sustainable, it just means it's not growing. Globally, it looks like fishing effort may have already peaked, but we are doing more research to verify this. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06825-8)
The majority of overfishing in the world is not in the Chinese distant water fleet. The Chinese distant water fleet (fishing in high seas or foreign waters -- outside of China) has around 2,500-2,700 vessels. The vast majority of the world's overfishing is caused by hundreds of thousands of industrial fishing vessels and few million small scale boats, not (just) these few thousand vessels. The vast majority of Chinese fishing is close to China (a few hundred thousand Chinese vessels).
Forced labor has been reported on many Chinese distant water vessels. This sad fact, though, is true for most distant water fleets. Being far from a home port and having little oversight makes it easy for captains to keep crew captive and not pay them. Our research suggests that an extremely high portion of the world’s distant water fleet – even from developed countries – have a high risk of forced labor. We need more oversight and mandatory reporting for distant water fleet vessels.
A positive note is that China's fleet does respond to transparency. So, focusing on transgressions (as Noah recommends environmental groups do) does change behavior.
For instance in 2020, Global Fishing Watch published research showing almost a thousand Chinese vessels fishing in North Korean waters – in violation of U.N. sanctions – as well as a few thousand North Korean vessels fishing in Russian waters. Once we made this public, China took action, and its size in North Korea has decreased by about 75% (although notably not to zero). (https://globalfishingwatch.org/article/2020-analysis-dark-fleets/)
Another example: Noah highlights the Chinese fleet fishing in international waters near South America. While fishing for squid is largely legal here – although many vessels here have been found to have used forced labor – public outcry over their intense fishing along the edge of Galapagos waters has led the boats to temporarily back off. You can see on the Global Fishing Watch map that they created a 50-nautical-mile buffer between them and the islands’ exclusive economic zones. https://bit.ly/3MZS9nB
Final comment on the trawling figure, which shows catch, not effort. The U.S. and Japan and other countries continue to trawl, China just does it the most. What is fascinating about that graph is that in Japan and U.S. catch is going down, yet China's stays really high. How is it that China can catch so much, even though they have presumably overfished their waters? One reason China's catch is so high is that they have fished so much that the upper trophic levels (think tasty things like Tuna, which eat smaller fish) are mostly gone, and as a result, there are no predators and the lower trophic levels are more productive (https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1612722114). So, they are able to get more food out of the ocean. Most western cultures do not eat these lower trophic level food, but they do in China. Moreover, trawling is indiscriminate, catching anything in the path of nets. Most trawlers discard large amounts of unwanted catch, called bycatch. But in China, they usually use it all, either eating it or using it as fishmeal for aquaculture. There is a strange way that the Chinese fishing is more efficient at getting food out of the marine ecosystem -- albeit at a high ecological cost.
I am optimistic that we are going to fix the problems that Noah outlines -- both in the Chinese fleet and others. A major reason for these problems is that what has happened in the ocean has been out of sight and out of mind. Technology is creating transparency, laying the groundwork for better management of the largest global commons, the ocean.
A recent report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — part of the UN system — warned that if current trends of overfishing and climate change continue unchecked, global fish stocks (especially commercially important ones) could be effectively depleted by around 2050.
Japan, which used to rape the oceans, is now farming Tuna. We farm salmon and have to die their meat pink because farm raised doesn’t eat small shrimp. We are moving toward Soylent Green
Should be VERY easy to follow all the ships using satellites and AI to monitor visually (no transponder required!) where they're from and where they're going. I think it's time to get one of the tech bros involved and have them purchase a submarine for Sea Shepherd. No transponder? Into the drink with you. Transponder but in waters illegally? Ditto. The cost of losing a ship is too great to sustain for very long.
Thanks for highlighting this Noah. Surprised to see no mention of the increasing role of aquaculture in seafood production. Aquaculture now accounts for a greater share of fish consumption than wild capture. Critical we continue to scale aquaculture, farm new species and bring down the cost, to reduce pressure on wild stocks.
I assume that all the fish they are illegally catching aren’t all consumed in China. I never buy seafood sourced from the PRC (and avoid other Chinese food products because of unethical business and farming practices) but maybe they are transshipping through other countries also.
I only eat unagi in Japan, because in the US almost all eel is from China (and is overfished and threatened) since it is half or less the price of Japanese eel. Even farmed unagi is bad because of their life cycle, which is the opposite of salmon - adult eels swim out to sea to spawn and the baby glass eels swim back to their home rivers to live, and farms thus need to catch the wild glass eels to stock their ponds.
HFCs are a poor example. They did not have positive externalities, they just lacked one negative externality. They were more expensive and less efficient than CFCs.
That's true. The advantage regulators had with CFCs was that they were produced by only a handful of companies (maybe only 5 or 6) so non-co-operation was far easier to police. Plus, in chemicals industries regulations often favour incumbents by serving as barriers to entry.
Appears that Japan has improved its performance on biodiversity. Is it taking less fish mass per person? It does seem to be protecting its forests more.
A simple first step would be a global ban on bottom trawling. No exceptions at all.
It's like if you harvested deer by dragging chain saw wire and tumbling grapples through a forest between two giant bulldozers, killing every other living thing in between. Most bottom trawling wouldn't happen without subsidies and tax breaks on fuel.
They wouldn’t care if they wanted to do it. Read that article about the Soviets slaughtering huge numbers of whales for no reason and misreporting the numbers to the international community. Whistle blowers eventually told the world so that the science would make sense, that’s how many whales were just missing.
The Most Senseless Environmental Crime of the 20th Century - Pacific Standard https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774/#:~:text=The%20Soviet%20whale%20slaughter%20followed,real%20demand%20for%20whale%20products.
Feels like you're missing the entire point of this piece. "International Law" isn't real if nobody enforces it and China knows this very well. They're playing a different game.
China is sensitive about how the rest of the world views it. They'll ignore a law if it's not a big embarrassment. But if we make them lose face over it, make them look unsuited to be a global leader if they continue, they'll change behavior.
As Noah's piece points out, they clearly do not care about this issue as they're already blatantly ignoring international and regional law because they recognize accurately that the court of global populist public opinion is the only one that matters for the purpose of face saving.
As with most issues, activist groups are extremely reluctant to criticize or hold accountable any group other than Western states. More importantly, the political and propaganda climate (surely driven in no small part by Chinese efforts like TikTok etc.) mean that it is very easy to mobilize huge amounts of global anger / outrage etc at the USA, or Europeans actors for environmental issues but essentially impossible to do so against a non-Western country like China.
China knows it can get away with murder and does so often. They couldn't care less unless global populist opinion changes. The closest they've come to dropping the ball on this was COVID but even in that case they managed to turn reasonable, science-and-intelligence backed theories like the lab leak hypothesis into fringe, partisan conspiracies.
They are masterful at this.
It's not impossible. China is very thin skinned. The EU could do it, by first banning bottom trawling and cutting associated fuel subsidies.
Personally, my belief is that activist groups know that more authoritarian or non-western governments would just ignore them and they actually would barely have an impact or attention, so they go to the places where they can feel morally superior, safe and also impact policy a little bit. I dunno, but it definitely is harder to go after the people that are the real baddies and they don't seem to care about that fight.
China lost in the International Court on their claims in the South China Sea. There has been zero change in their claims or policy. They will look unsuited to be a global leader? Perhaps true in the eyes of those who hold values that the Chinese government ignores.
The south china sea is about control of their region though, and of trade routes. This is a more diffuse global issue of reputation.
It seems privateers would be a great solution here. Sovereign nations can grant licenses to people to seize and sell illegal fishing vessels in their territorial water, even is the state doesn't have the resources to seize the ships themselves.
My friend Jack is very keen on this solution. In a private email to me he wrote: 'Ahh, Jim lad! Shiver me timbers! Economic incentives for privateering, that's the way to address the problem of Chinese over-fishing of international waters'.
I do not think this is very promising because the Chinese would have a legal and moral right to respond with armed force against the privateers and their host country. I do not think any countries, even the United States, are prepared to do that over fishing rights.
Would China actually have a legal right to respond with armed force against, say, Chile if Chile seized Chinese vessels illegally fishing in Chile's territorial waters? That doesn't seem likely to me. Countries have a right to enforce their laws in their territory. It seems to me that a military response would constitute an act of war by China.
Of course, China might well respond forcefully in other ways.
That would certainly apply to Chilean law-enforcement in Chilean territorial waters and I think exclusive economic zone.
I am not confident that Chile can subcontract that out to private parties. In particular, if a private ship comes up to your fishing boat and tries to board you, I think you have a good claim to use force to repel them. And to ask your navy for assistance in doing so.
A navy entering another nation's territorial waters to repel that nation's authorized representatives seems like an act of war to me. It definitely wouldn't qualify as Innocent Passage.
However, pretty much every western nation is a signatory to the 1856 Declaration of Paris, in which they formally abolished privateering, so they'd probably have to use a different mechanism. Perhaps they could deputize private individuals as law enforcement.
We are going to go to war with China sooner or later. Get a working large scale Ballistic Missile Defense system, then provoke a war. As part of the surrender terms, require them to stop fishing. We can also destroy their fishing fleet.
They would have neither. If you disarm a robber that breaks into your house, he doesn't have the "legal and moral right" to do anything to retaliate.
If you let them get away with this crap, it will escalate. Appeasement doesn't work.
The ongoing PRC-Philippines conflict in the South China Sea can provide a picture of how these situations play out. I agree that deputizing privateers and granting them the catch as payment would be a good place to start.
Privateering is IIUC now banned under customary international law.
Noah, I work with WHOI .... this is a massive problem...thanks for highlighting.
Thanks for raising awareness to this issue.
Quibble in the first part: the ozone layer CFCs/HFCs seems like a really bad example there. The Montreal Protocol was massively successful and required substantial international cooperation. It’s not like investments in HFCs which eventually made them cheaper happened idiosyncratically.
Today's article, "China is killing the fish," was courageous, high-caliber journalism. Not too long ago, piracy on the seas was common. This is similar. Governments of the world do have a responsibility outside their sovereign borders. After all, this Earth is our common home, and it should be a collective concern to sustain its health for future generations.
This is important and well-known to those of us who follow such issues.
It's even worse than you think. China wants to harvest krill from the Antarctic. Krill are the foundation of the marine food chain. Allowing this will kill off many or most marine animals.
I first stumbled across this oceanic plunder in the pages of The Economist years ago, but Noah's latest dispatch delivers the knockout punch: fresh data, stark hypocrisy, and an urgent call to stop pretending this isn't happening.
Reading it, though, I can't shake the image of Independence Day—those colossal alien ships hovering over our planet, methodically stripping every resource without a flicker of concern for the locals getting in the way. Swap the extraterrestrials for Beijing's armada of subsidized trawlers, and the script feels eerily familiar: harvest everything, leave devastation in your wake, and call it progress. The only difference? These 'aliens' are very much from Earth—and they're not even trying to hide the invasion anymore.
Time to decide whether we keep watching the blockbuster unfold... or start fighting back before the credits roll on global fisheries.
Having crossed Chinese fishing boats in other countries territorial waters personally, this is absolutely true: Running dark (transponders off), truly dark (navigation lights off!), trailing 6 mile long fish lines, not answering radio calls on international hailing channels...
That said, I remember closing on the PNW coast in 1977. A vast sea of lights, exactly outside the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone of the US. A Russian fishing fleet with a factory processing mother ship.
And now, Trump opens up the only Marine National Monument in Atlantic to commercial fishing.
Stupidity and avarice know no country.
About tiime someone noticed. Since Greenpeace turned into a fund raising scam, the oceans haven't had an advocate.
A few clarifications, points of agreement, and broader context, based on leading research at Global Fishing Watch over the past decade:
China's fleet actually isn't getting bigger. It looks like the domestic fleet is shrinking and the distant water fleet is somewhat steady in size or maybe slightly decreasing. That does not mean it's sustainable, it just means it's not growing. Globally, it looks like fishing effort may have already peaked, but we are doing more research to verify this. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06825-8)
The majority of overfishing in the world is not in the Chinese distant water fleet. The Chinese distant water fleet (fishing in high seas or foreign waters -- outside of China) has around 2,500-2,700 vessels. The vast majority of the world's overfishing is caused by hundreds of thousands of industrial fishing vessels and few million small scale boats, not (just) these few thousand vessels. The vast majority of Chinese fishing is close to China (a few hundred thousand Chinese vessels).
Forced labor has been reported on many Chinese distant water vessels. This sad fact, though, is true for most distant water fleets. Being far from a home port and having little oversight makes it easy for captains to keep crew captive and not pay them. Our research suggests that an extremely high portion of the world’s distant water fleet – even from developed countries – have a high risk of forced labor. We need more oversight and mandatory reporting for distant water fleet vessels.
A positive note is that China's fleet does respond to transparency. So, focusing on transgressions (as Noah recommends environmental groups do) does change behavior.
For instance in 2020, Global Fishing Watch published research showing almost a thousand Chinese vessels fishing in North Korean waters – in violation of U.N. sanctions – as well as a few thousand North Korean vessels fishing in Russian waters. Once we made this public, China took action, and its size in North Korea has decreased by about 75% (although notably not to zero). (https://globalfishingwatch.org/article/2020-analysis-dark-fleets/)
Another example: Noah highlights the Chinese fleet fishing in international waters near South America. While fishing for squid is largely legal here – although many vessels here have been found to have used forced labor – public outcry over their intense fishing along the edge of Galapagos waters has led the boats to temporarily back off. You can see on the Global Fishing Watch map that they created a 50-nautical-mile buffer between them and the islands’ exclusive economic zones. https://bit.ly/3MZS9nB
Final comment on the trawling figure, which shows catch, not effort. The U.S. and Japan and other countries continue to trawl, China just does it the most. What is fascinating about that graph is that in Japan and U.S. catch is going down, yet China's stays really high. How is it that China can catch so much, even though they have presumably overfished their waters? One reason China's catch is so high is that they have fished so much that the upper trophic levels (think tasty things like Tuna, which eat smaller fish) are mostly gone, and as a result, there are no predators and the lower trophic levels are more productive (https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1612722114). So, they are able to get more food out of the ocean. Most western cultures do not eat these lower trophic level food, but they do in China. Moreover, trawling is indiscriminate, catching anything in the path of nets. Most trawlers discard large amounts of unwanted catch, called bycatch. But in China, they usually use it all, either eating it or using it as fishmeal for aquaculture. There is a strange way that the Chinese fishing is more efficient at getting food out of the marine ecosystem -- albeit at a high ecological cost.
I am optimistic that we are going to fix the problems that Noah outlines -- both in the Chinese fleet and others. A major reason for these problems is that what has happened in the ocean has been out of sight and out of mind. Technology is creating transparency, laying the groundwork for better management of the largest global commons, the ocean.
I don’t remember when this came out.
A recent report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — part of the UN system — warned that if current trends of overfishing and climate change continue unchecked, global fish stocks (especially commercially important ones) could be effectively depleted by around 2050.
Japan, which used to rape the oceans, is now farming Tuna. We farm salmon and have to die their meat pink because farm raised doesn’t eat small shrimp. We are moving toward Soylent Green
Superb, scary piece, Noah-san.
Should be VERY easy to follow all the ships using satellites and AI to monitor visually (no transponder required!) where they're from and where they're going. I think it's time to get one of the tech bros involved and have them purchase a submarine for Sea Shepherd. No transponder? Into the drink with you. Transponder but in waters illegally? Ditto. The cost of losing a ship is too great to sustain for very long.
Thanks for highlighting this Noah. Surprised to see no mention of the increasing role of aquaculture in seafood production. Aquaculture now accounts for a greater share of fish consumption than wild capture. Critical we continue to scale aquaculture, farm new species and bring down the cost, to reduce pressure on wild stocks.
I assume that all the fish they are illegally catching aren’t all consumed in China. I never buy seafood sourced from the PRC (and avoid other Chinese food products because of unethical business and farming practices) but maybe they are transshipping through other countries also.
I only eat unagi in Japan, because in the US almost all eel is from China (and is overfished and threatened) since it is half or less the price of Japanese eel. Even farmed unagi is bad because of their life cycle, which is the opposite of salmon - adult eels swim out to sea to spawn and the baby glass eels swim back to their home rivers to live, and farms thus need to catch the wild glass eels to stock their ponds.
HFCs are a poor example. They did not have positive externalities, they just lacked one negative externality. They were more expensive and less efficient than CFCs.
That's true. The advantage regulators had with CFCs was that they were produced by only a handful of companies (maybe only 5 or 6) so non-co-operation was far easier to police. Plus, in chemicals industries regulations often favour incumbents by serving as barriers to entry.
Appears that Japan has improved its performance on biodiversity. Is it taking less fish mass per person? It does seem to be protecting its forests more.