Chinese fishing fleets that engage in “illegal, unreported, and unregulated” fishing, aka IUU fishing, have a plan. Whenever one country kicks out a fleet, it moves on to trawl the waters of another country (“China’s distant-water fleet turns toward Chilean ports after Peruvian crackdown of IUU fishing,” SeafoodSource News, May 19, 2025).
Last year, Peru’s Production Ministry issued an emergency decree which sought to strengthen the country’s fight against IUU fishing by restricting foreign vessels in Peruvian waters. The regulation—which largely aims to protect Southern Pacific giant flying squid and is mostly directed toward China’s controversial distant-water fleet—requires any foreign vessel looking to enter Peru to have a government-sanctioned SISESAT satellite device onboard and activated, regardless of the reason for its entry.
Since the decree’s entry into force, the presence of Chinese ships in Peru have been reduced to a minimum, Committee for the Sustainable Management of the Southern Pacific Jumbo Flying Squid (CALAMASUR) President Alfonso Miranda said in a release.
However, it seems those ships are now simply opting to go to friendlier ports, including in Chile.
To say that some of the country ports to which China’s massive-ship fishing fleets are now drifting are “friendlier”—because less willing to monitor or deter China’s mass scooping of local resources—is not quite the right way to put it.
The more-compliant governments may be intimidated or they may be paid off. But the fisherman and consumers of fish of those other countries, who now have fewer fish and less access to fish, are not getting a veto. They can only protest as vigorously as possible in hopes that their governments will eventually decide to do what Peru has done, let the Chinese fleet know by word and deed that enough is enough.
Half-measures won’t suffice. If those “friendlier” countries set limits to the Chinese fishing but fail to require “any foreign vessel looking to enter” the country’s waters “to have a government-sanctioned SISESAT satellite device onboard and activated,” as an unfriendly country like Peru now requires, the situation will be the same as if no limits had been set. The vessels of the fleet will simply disable any tracking of their movements and proceed to plunder with impunity.
