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How Chinese Fishing Vessels Are Using Technology To Plunder African Waters

How Chinese Fishing Vessels Are Using Technology To Plunder African Waters

From Time.com. Story by Charlie Campbell.

Much of impoverished West Africa relies on fishing for income and sustenance. However, Chinese fishing vessels, using illegal techniques like large drift nets — banned by the U.N. in 1992 because of their indiscriminate killing — have led to a precipitous decline in the number and size of fish caught.

Drift nets uncovered by environmentalists range from 10 to over 100 nautical miles in length, plunging from buoys at the surface to lead weights some 40 feet deep. Traditional fishermen, paddling dugout wooden canoes and hand-casting nets, cannot compete with these “insidious curtains of death,” as they have been dubbed by one environmental group.

Sharks, turtles and porpoises are routinely snared as bycatch. “Two or three industrial vessels can clear the near coastal waters of Sierra Leone, for example, in a very short period if they use destructive fishing gear and practices,” says Steve Trent, executive director of the London-based NGO Environmental Justice Foundation. “It’s not about hundreds or thousands; relatively few boats can wreak havoc.”

Five years ago, most boats targeting West Africa were Taiwanese or South Korean; now nearly all are Chinese.

As well as corruption and poor enforcement, efforts to stop illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) Chinese fishing are deliberately hampered by Chinese vessels concealing their identities.

Often they simply change the names painted on the side, unlawfully adopt the flags of the host nation, or flee to international waters if challenged by the local coast guard.

Increasingly, though, boats are concealing their true whereabouts by tampering with automatic identification system (AIS) devices. AIS are global satellite positioning beacons that display a vessel’s location. They can be picked up by various monitoring systems, including satellites and handheld receivers. However, coverage is piecemeal and different nations have contrasting AIS regulations.

For the past three years, SkyTruth, a U.S. non-governmental organization, has been working with Google and environmental group Oceana to develop a global automatic identification system monitoring system, Global Fishing Watch, to allow real-time tracking of vessels in a bid to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. It is due to go live later this year.

In the course of his research, one of SkyTruth’s top researchers, Bjorn Bergman, noticed something curious. He saw that a Chinese vessel with an AIS reading in international waters off New Zealand was adopting a curious, though somewhat familiar, route. “We moved its track over and saw it fitted exactly against the coast of South America,” he tells TIME. “It was pretty clear that the Straits of Magellan was the real location of the boat.”

Since then, SkyTruth says that by contrasting automatic identification systems with visual or other forms of data it has proved that at least 40 Chinese vessels are transmitting consistently false locations. There have been boats claiming to be off the coast of Mexico but really in the Guinea Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and some even bizarrely purporting to be in the center of landmasses. “It is almost exclusively Chinese vessels that we have found spoofing,” he says.

Environmentalists are calling on the Beijing authorities to better regulate the activities of all Chinese vessels, scale back overcapacity and end the state subsidies fishing operations enjoy. They also want China — and all world governments — to make automatic identification systems obligatory and companies legally culpable should their readings not be correct. Unique vessel identifiers— a permanent code equivalent to a car vehicle-identification number etched into the engine block — should also be made mandatory for all vessels around the globe, they say.

Making AIS mandatory would also aid the ability of SkyTruth’s Global Fishing Watch system to track all vessels around the world, flagging those that appear to be using destructive fishing techniques, like drift nets.

Vessels exhibit certain characteristics depending on their purpose. Container ships, for example, always take the straightest possible route between two ports to reduce fuel costs. SkyTruth is developing an algorithm that would automatically flag vessels that betray classic drift net fishing behavior — essentially, sailing in large loops with lengthy pauses at each end — via their automatic identification system readings.

That way, when retailers such as Walmart or Costco are sourcing seafood, they can choose those fishing vessels that have satellite data definitely showing where, when and how they have been operating.

“When the market starts rewarding operators that are transparent and trackable, and penalizing those that aren’t, then we’re really going start shrinking down the ‘dark fleet,’” says SkyTruth president John Amos.

Combining responsible consumption, satellite technology and enhanced enforcement will help protect the world’s seas, and those that live by them, from creeping ruin.

Read more at Time.com.