A recent report documented up to 6,000 foreign fishing vessels that disabled their public tracking devices for more than 24 hours along the border of Argentina’s national waters, sounding the alarm that they could be illegally fishing in the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). “The Chinese fleet was responsible for 66 percent of these incidents,” said the June report by Oceana, a Washington-based non-profit organization dedicated to protecting and restoring the global oceans. The report claims that hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels mainly target shortfin squid, which is vital to both Argentina’s economy and ecosystem. The analysis concludes that from January 2018 to April this year, undetected fishing activities took up more than 600,000 total hours, and many vessels turned off their Automatic Identification System (AIS) within one mile of Argentina’s EEZ. The AIS from Global Fishing Watch, an online technology platform launched in 2016 by Oceana, SkyTruth, and Google, …
