The ‘Fu Yuan Yu 7882’ is a 73 meter long jigger. she belongs to one of the largest conglomerates of fishing extractive industry in the world, China’s Pingtan Marine Enterprise. He has so many ships that his fleet listing is gibberish in which Fu Yuan Yu is almost like a prefix; there are ‘fu yuan yus’ from 151 to number 9,714, between trawlers, jiggers, driftnets and longlines. Soldiers of a fishing army that currently has 188 troops, according to a study by the Environmental Justice Foundation (ESJ). None of them operate in Chinese jurisdictional waters, depleted after decades of overfishing. All of them are ships of the long-distance fleet (‘distant water fleet’, DWF), sponsored and defended by Beijing as a mechanism to preserve its national waters and to supply the demand of their homes and industries. And subsidized, very subsidized. A report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the United States, released last June, figures the direct aid from the Government of Xi Jinping to its fishing industry in 7,261 million dollars annuallythe equivalent of about 20 million euros per day.
Most of this sidereal distribution of funds is destined to a capacity increase, as analyzed in an extensive report (titled ‘Updated estimates and analysis of global fisheries subsidies’) by scientists U. Rashid Sumaila, Daniel Skerritt, Anna Schuhbauer, Naazia Ebrahim, Yang Li, Hong Sik Kim, Tabitha Grace Mallory, Vicky WL Lam and Daniel Pauly. Although the opacity in the records complicates the actual analysis of the figures. “Transparency on the amount of subsidies has been reduced”, confirms the EJF. In any case, those twenty million that Beijing injects every day into the sector exacerbate an activity that is in the doldrums in Europe, with a progressive limitation of extractive works that results in a greater dependence on third countries, such as China, or others reprimanded by Brussels itself for illegal or unregulated fishing (Vietnam or Panama). The Aid in Europe for the construction of new ships is vetoed –also for the change of the main engine–, and diesel subsidies are executed through tax exemptions, not direct treasury injections.
One of the directors of Pingtan Marine Enterprise, Xinrong Zhuo, was sanctioned this Friday by the US Treasury office for “serious human rights abuses” and illegal fishing, as was Li Zhenyu, from the Dalian Ocean Fishing company. The first of them, Pingtan, received last year a grant of 19 million dollars (18.01 million euros, at the current exchange rate) to develop precisely its high-altitude activity and through one of its subsidiaries (Fujian Provincial Pingtan County Ocean Fishing Group Co.); the other, Dalian, brought in more than 8 million dollars. The grant sharing is a practice that all companies should declare of this sector that are listed on stock markets such as Shanghai or Shenzhen, but there are only reports from Shanghai Kaichuang Marine International. She is the owner of the Hijos de Carlos Albo cannery, which on December 2 reported the income of 39.8 million yuan (5.43 million euros) in subsidies for “economic and commercial development abroad”.
the true dimension
The activity of this long-distance fleet spans all oceans, thanks to this intense policy of subsidies from Beijing: from the vicinity of the Galapagos to those of the Malvinas, on the border of the jurisdictional waters of Argentina (the so-called mile 201), Ecuador, Mauritania or Indonesia. The actual muscle of these Chinese tall ships is unclear. “Although China’s DWF fleet is known to be large, there are little information is available about its actual size and the scale of its operations”, confirms a study signed by Miren Gutiérrez, Alfonso Daniels, Guy Jobbins, Guillermo Gutiérrez Almazor and César Montenegro, published in 2020. The estimates calculated a figure of up to 3,400 ships, but they do not coincide with the satellite positioning traces (AIS). , analyzed in the renowned FishSpektrum Krakken database. Based on this analysis, the traces of at least 16,966 Chinese high-altitude or long-distance fishing vessels have been detected, up to eight times more than those previously evaluated, thanks to registration in third countries such as Ghana, Mauritania, Ivory Coast, Cambodia, Senegal, Russia, Morocco, Belize, Vanuatu, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines or Panama.
There are up to eight times as many Chinese high-altitude ships as registered
“Flags of convenience – exposes this latest work, entitled ‘China’s distantwater fishing fleet’ – can also help protect boat owners from legal action or scientific scrutiny, particularly by hiding who the owner really is. Several of these flags of convenience are tax havens. The file opened by the US Treasury to Dalian illustrates the working conditions on some of these vessels, such as the tuna vessel ‘Long Xing 629,’ and how this fleet operates without control and without interruption. “After 13 months without visiting port, with average working days of 18 hours, with expired food and drinking desalinated seawater, five crew members had died. The bodies of three of them were thrown into the ocean.” And he ends: “When the survivors got home they were diagnosed with malnutrition and they received only a part of the promised salary”.
“On the Long Xing 629, five sailors died; three bodies were thrown into the sea”
The supply on the high seas with tankers and the unloading of catches in ‘reefers’, which link these fishing grounds with the Chinese ports of Fujian or Dalian, is what allows this permanent activity. And that China can export fish worth more than 11,000 million euros per year from its territory alone, in addition to another 4,200 made from marine protein.