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Comment by reenorap | Hacker News Reader

You can't have a sustainable ecology when China sends a city of trawlers to devastate fish stocks around the world and then sends it all back to China. It leaves the countries that were depending on that fish suffering with no repercussions for China. As far as I'm concerned, those cities of fishing boats should be sunk because it's an act of war by China.

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PRC fishing mostly on international waters is an act of war now? NVM PRC DWF about as well behaved as other distant fishing fleet in terms of clipping EEZs and they're still underfishing per capita relative other large fishing powers, i.e. they're taking less from commons then entitled.

Countries dependent are migratory transnational resource extraction are frankly living on a retarded business model and have only themselves to blame. Reminder 80% of PRC fish comes from sustainable aquaculture that control in their soveign waters. That's your sustainable ecology model, but it requires capex / infra to manage husbandry instead relying on gaia like some hunter gather.

That's absolute bs. There's documented videos of basically armadas fishing up to the very edge of Argentina's territorial waters.

>very edge of Argentina's territorial waters

The edge of EEZs, aka the high seas, aka fucking international waters. There's lots of documentation of PRC DWF legally fishing where they're entitled that useful idiots think is illegal activity because US was pumping propaganda bux and generating false narratives / wedge issues countries PRC was cozying up with and rationalize deploying their coast guards to undermine PRC interests.

There's occasionally misbehavior, i.e. AIS shenanigans for incursions from minority of vessels, but PRC bheavior proportionally is slightly BETTER than other DWFs, i.e. SKR, TW, ES. TLDR if an a countries entire extract model falls because some foreign vessels pops a few nautical miles into 200 mile long EEZ, i.e. a few % of occasional incursion, then their national fishing managment models are not sustainable.

BTW, there's a reason only few ships are ever interdicted, because in aggregate, PRC DWF is just not a fucking issue. There were actual attemps where US coast guards tried to board PRC DWF fleets on high seas, again, international waters, and was lolled off. So the answer to all those asking why DWF fleets aren't sunk (I assume in good faith they mean all DWF and not just PRC's), the answer is simple: most operate legally, in international waters, pillaging the commons unsustainably as they are entitled to.

What about the Chinese ships turning off their transponders? The news says its an ongoing problem dominated by one country.

There are studies of AIS disabling events, highest proportion of ships/time. IIRC, avg worst is Spain, ~15% obscure. Then US, ~8%, then TW ~5% then PRC slightly less. US gets pass since US fishing happens in North West Atlantic - US has big EEZ. Not much info on SKR/JP (other biggest DWF) except they tend to fish where PRC fishes and do all your slave labour that other DWF does, so hard to believe they don't do AIS shenanigans. IIRC worse (by type) absolute was JP for tuna longliner. There's other consideration that DWF has global players interacting, i.e. JP doesn't do destructive trawling, but they run big transhipment reefers (fridge boat) to support to fish longer.

MSM will focus almost exclusively PRC. It's spiked narrative. TLDR, go track "research" on PRC DWF since ~2020 when the champaign started. The estimate of PRC DWF by west aligned research... laundered by western news went from something like 3000 to 6000 (reasonable), to 10000 to 18000... in 5 years. Meanwhile PRC wild catch increased from 12m tons to 15m tons, i.e. PRC somehow built ~30000 new fishing ships in 5 years, 950% increase... only to fish 25% more. It's all stupid all the time.

Chinese fishing vessels should be sunk en masse.

When someone is eating the food that you and your children need to eat, you should probably consider that an act of war.

Good thing it's not their food then. Again most of fishing done legally in high seas, international waters, where commercial fishing at industrial scales now sufficient to alter coastal state ecology. And that sucks for them. But UNCLOS gave these fishing states 200nm which is fuckload more area historic fishing practices need. Meanwhile PRC, one of the largest countries with the smallest coastal entitlement / EEZs due to regional geography means they have to fish on high seas for proportional access. That's baked into UNCLOS, coastal states gets to milk their EEZ, everyone else gets access to the commons. If someone wants to start a war over that, they can, but let's not pretend they'd be anything but pirates, because DWF pillaging he commons is both legally allowed and intended.

If they can get to 80% locally, why not 100%. Why go to thousands of km away to get the 20%?

Because they are different goods that can't be aquacultured locally. Because PRC fisherman gets to make a living selling higher value wild fish like everyone else. Because it's simply not a problem when PRC decides to fish in international waters, again like everyone else, all of whom are similarly poorly behaved, i.e. SKR, JP, TW, ES... but you know 3/4 of those are US partners vs PRC, so they don't get the smear campaign.

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