Chinese fishing operations are raising alarms around the world

South America

Circles show Chinese fishing in 2020 and 2021.

Pacific Ocean

Galapagos Islands

Ecuador

Argentina

Atlantic Ocean

Rich and ecologically diverse, the waters around the Galápagos Islands have attracted local anglers for centuries. Now these waters face a much bigger and more rapacious hunter: China.

Chinese fishing in ⬤ 2020 and ⬤ 2021.

The Galápagos are part of Ecuador. And yet every year an increasing number of Chinese commercial vessels, thousands of miles from home, fish here, sometimes right on the edge of Ecuador's Exclusive Economic Zone.

Chinese vessels since 2016 have operated off South America virtually all day, all year round, moving seasonally from the coasts of Ecuador in Peru…

…and finally to Argentina, where they have already fished what collectively amounts to more than 16,000 days this year.

The scale has sounded the alarm about damage to local economies and the environment, as well as the commercial sustainability of tuna, squid and other species.

Note: data for 2020 is from June 2020 to May 2021; for 2021, it is from June 2021 to May 2022.

Over the past two decades, China has built by far the largest deep-sea fishing fleet in the world, with nearly 3,000 vessels. Having severely depleted stocks in its own coastal waters, China now fishes in any ocean in the world, and on a scale that dwarfs some countries' entire fleets near their own waters.

The impact is increasingly being felt from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific, from the coasts of Africa to those off South America - a high-seas manifestation of China's global economic power.