A recent blog post by Noah Smith highlights the prevalence of forced labor, overfishing and illegal fishing in the Chinese fleet. These problems are not specific to China, however – China just has the largest fleet. And for most of these problems, more transparency can help.
First, a surprising correction. Noah says “China’s fishing fleet just keeps getting bigger and bigger.” That isn’t true. The domestic fleet is actually getting smaller. And the distant water fleet – vessels fishing in foreign waters or the high seas – is stable or declining. This decline is part of a broader global trend: global fishing effort is not increasing, and may actually be decreasing.
Noah highlights that forced labor is common on Chinese distant water vessels. This, 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 own research suggests an extremely high portion of the world’s distant water fleet – even from developed countries – have a high risk of forced labor.
Another problem highlighted is illegal fishing. Noah claims that much of China’s distant water fishing is illegal. But the truth is, we don’t actually know the scale of the problem. That is changing, however, and we have proof that transparency alters behavior.
In 2020, we 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 has decreased by about 75% (although notably not to zero).
Noah also highlights the Chinese fleet fishing in international waters near South America. While fishing for squid is 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.
A driving reason for many of these problems – forced labor, overfishing and illegal fishing – which span the global fleet is that there is little monitoring and even less accountability. Historically, what happens over the horizon at sea has been out of sight and out of mind. With modern technology, we can now track these fleets and shine a light on their activity. I’m optimistic that this increased transparency will help us solve these problems in the coming decades.
[This post was cross posted from linkedin]