For years, the north coast of Japan had been the site of a macabre phenomenon: fishing boats washing up on the coast carrying the bodies of the dead North Koreans, more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from their homeland.
No one could explain why so many of these so-called “ghost ships” ended. in Japan that year. A Japanese Coast Guard said it could be as simple as the weather. Others speculated that North Korea’s old fishing fleet was at fault.
Since then, more of these rickety ships have surfaced en masse, albeit with fewer bodies. The mystery has puzzled authorities for years, but a study published Wednesday by the international non-profit organization Global Fishing Watch offers a compelling new theory. Blame the Chinese “dark fishing fleets”.
The report’s authors used various satellite technologies to analyze marine traffic in Northeast Asia in 2017 and 2018, and found that hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels were sailing in waters off North Korea. Chinese ships appeared to be fishing there illegally, pushing North Korea’s own fleet, which is ill-equipped to travel long distances, further off the coast of North Korea and in Russian and Japanese waters.
But that doesn’t seem to have deterred some 900 Chinese boats in 2017 and 700 the following year, according to the Global Fishing Watch report.
The nonprofit said these Chinese vessels likely caught more than 160,000 metric tons of Pacific flying squid, one of the region’s most valuable fishery products, in 2017 and 2018, more than South Korea and Japan combined during the same period. The estimated catch was worth more than $ 440 million.
Jaeyoon Park, senior data scientist at Global Fishing Watch and co-author of the study, said the detected vessels comprised “about a third of the size of the entire distant water fishing fleet in China.”
“It is the largest known case of illegal fishing perpetrated by vessels originating in one country operating in the waters of another nation,” he said.
With so many vessels off the coast of North Korea, the country’s own fishing fleet was ousted, forced to sail further offshore to find its catch, and the consequences were deadly, according to Jungsam Lee, another study collaborator. . authors.
“It is too dangerous for them to work in the same waters as the Chinese trawlers,” said Lee. “That is why they are pushed to work in Russian and Japanese waters and that explains why some of the damaged North Korean ships appeared on the beaches of Japan.”
CNN has contacted the Chinese Foreign Ministry for comment.
A sustainability problem
The waters of Northeast Asia are some of the most opaque and contested seas and fisheries worldwide. China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas are involved in some kind of territorial dispute between them.
Fish stocks have declined dramatically in recent years, another major problem that the parties have been unable to solve. Pacific flying squid stocks have fallen 80% in South Korean waters and 82% in Japanese waters since 2003, according to Global Fishing Watch.
Experts like Park believe that although Japan and South Korea have worked independently to make squid fishing more sustainable, “the absence of multilateral cooperation and the exchange of information between all the countries involved in this cross-border fishing means that it is impossible to obtain a solid science and a regional management plan for the stock. ”
South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries said it was reviewing the findings, while Masanori Miyahara, president of the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency, said in a statement accompanying the Global Fishing Watch study that the lack of Shared data is “a big problem”. challenge given the critical importance of squid in the region. “
“Illegal fishing in these waters is a very serious matter in Japan,” said Miyahara.
Park said his team’s investigation has highlighted a “fundamental failure in the proper and transparent management of a shared resource” and that there is an “urgent need for cooperation between the countries involved in this fishery.”
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