The waters off Chile, Peru, and Ecuador are among the most productive fishing grounds in the world. They are also among the most heavily exploited by distant-water industrial fleets — vessels operating thousands of nautical miles from their home ports, fishing in international waters just outside the exclusive economic zones of South American coastal states.
The largest such fleet is operated by China and consists, by Global Fishing Watch's published vessel tracking, of between 300 and 600 vessels at any given time. Spanish, Korean, and Taiwanese fleets operate in significant additional numbers. The principal target species are jumbo squid, jack mackerel, and increasingly tuna. The fleets fish along the boundary of the EEZs of the coastal states, sometimes — depending on whose data is consulted — across that boundary.
The pattern is structurally familiar from other parts of the world's oceans. Industrial-scale extraction is conducted in international waters, where regulatory authority is weak; the species being extracted move freely across the boundary between international and territorial waters, so the catches reduce the populations that the coastal states would otherwise be able to fish themselves; observer programmes on the fleets are limited; and the catch volumes that reach world markets understate, by significant margins, the actual extraction.
The jumbo squid fishery is the most studied case. Squid populations in the south-eastern Pacific have declined substantially since the early 2000s. The decline is driven by a combination of climate-related ocean changes — including the shift in upwelling patterns that follows El Niño cycles — and direct fishing pressure. The relative contribution of each is disputed. What is not disputed is that the squid fleet has expanded faster than the squid population, and that catches per vessel are falling.
The Chilean government in late 2018 declared a marine protected area of 720,000 square kilometres around Rapa Nui — Easter Island — making it on paper one of the largest marine reserves in the world. The Rapanui people led the campaign for its creation and supported its protections of subsistence and traditional fishing. The protected area covers waters within Chile's Rapa Nui EEZ. Enforcement against industrial fleets operating immediately outside that EEZ has been weak. The Rapanui community has described the situation as a betrayal — protection inside the line, extraction immediately outside, the species not honouring the line either way.
What might shift the pattern is the kind of multilateral fisheries-enforcement architecture that the world does not yet have. The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which governs much of the Pacific tuna fishery, has experimented with shared observer programmes and vessel-tracking transparency. The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation, which governs jack mackerel and squid, has been slower to develop comparable measures. The fleets that hammer this part of the world do so within rules that mostly permit what they do.
The Rapa Nui piece in the Place section of this edition reports on the same waters from a different angle — what the protection means to the people who fought for it. This piece reports the structural picture. Together, they are part of the same story.