In December 1991, the United Nations did something it almost never does to a profitable global industry: it told it to stop. General Assembly Resolution 46/215 called on every member of the international community to impose a moratorium, by the last day of 1992, on all large-scale pelagic driftnet fishing on the high seas. The resolution passed by consensus. Within a year the great driftnet fleets of the Pacific had effectively vanished, and the United States had passed its own High Seas Driftnet Fisheries Enforcement Act to lock the ban in with sanctions and port denials.
It remains one of the few genuine victories in the history of ocean conservation. And it is worth remembering exactly what was banned, because what replaced it is now doing the same work on a larger scale — and almost nobody is talking about a moratorium.
I. What a driftnet was
A large-scale pelagic driftnet was a curtain of monofilament mesh hung in the open water, drifting with the current, sometimes stretching for tens of kilometres in a single set. By the late 1980s the fleets were setting an area of net measured not in metres but in the millions of square miles each year. The nets did not discriminate. Anything that swam into them — the target tuna and squid, but also dolphins, sharks, turtles, seals, and seabirds — was held until it drowned or was hauled up dead. Conservationists called them “walls of death,” and the name stuck because it was accurate. The world banned them not because they caught the wrong fish, but because they killed indiscriminately, invisibly, across vast stretches of ocean that belonged to no one.
That is the precedent. Hold it in mind.
II. What replaced it
The dominant method for catching tuna, swordfish, and billfish on the high seas today is the pelagic longline. A single mainline can run beyond 100 kilometres (over 60 miles), carrying thousands of baited hooks, left to “soak” in the open water for hours or days. One vessel is a small operation. A fleet is something else entirely.
The scale is genuinely difficult to grasp in your mind. In the global tuna longline fishery alone, by figures widely cited across the conservation literature, around five million hooks are set every single day on roughly 100,000 miles of line — enough line to circle the planet four times over, every day. A 2023 study which applied machine learning to four years of GPS data from the global longline fleet — around 5,000 vessels — found that the gear's footprint touches more than 40 percent of the entire ocean at least once in a given year. On any single day, around 1.5 percent of the world's ocean surface sits within a few dozen kilometres of a freshly set line.
Driftnets were banned for being walls. Longlines are a web, drawn across nearly half the ocean, with five million hooks set anew each day.
Driftnets were banned for being walls. Longlines are not walls; they are a web, drawn across nearly half the ocean, with five million hooks set anew each day. The mechanism changed. The logic did not.
III. The killing is the same kind of killing
The objection to driftnets was because they were non-selective. Longlining was sold as the cleaner alternative — a hook, after all, is aimed at a fish. The evidence does not support the reassurance.
Worldwide, longline fisheries are estimated to drown between 160,000 and 320,000 seabirds every year, most of them snatching bait as the line goes out and being dragged under. Albatrosses bear the worst of it; longlining is now considered the single greatest threat to several albatross species, and the gear kills birds faster than the slowest-breeding of them can replace themselves. For the open-ocean sharks — blue, mako, oceanic whitetip, thresher, silky, several already listed as threatened — longlining is likewise the number-one threat, with research estimating on the order of 20 million pelagic sharks taken each year by vessels fishing for tuna. Much of that catch is never recorded: hooked sharks frequently die on the line or are thrown back, unlogged, as unwanted.
There is one further dimension worth naming. A meaningful share of the sharks hooked on longlines does not simply die uncounted. It enters the global shark fin trade. Shark fins are among the most expensive seafood products in the world, valued for the soup that has been a status dish in Chinese and overseas Chinese cuisine for centuries; Hong Kong has been the central trading hub, China and other Asian markets the principal consumers. Sharks taken as “bycatch” by tuna longliners — particularly in the Indian and Pacific Oceans — are increasingly retained for their fins rather than released. Indonesia, the world's largest shark producer, owes most of its catch to bycatch from tuna longlining. Several regional fisheries commissions have formally banned shark finning aboard their member fleets; enforcement is uneven, and the long-running loophole of landing fins separately from bodies — which allows the misidentification of protected species and the under-reporting of total catch — has only been partially closed. The boundary between bycatch and target catch, on a longliner with hold space and a market a thousand miles ahead, is more porous than the published categories suggest.
The Pacific gives the clearest single picture. By one analysis of the data, pelagic longlining there captured around 4.4 million non-target animals in an average year — millions of sharks, roughly a million marlin, tens of thousands of sea turtles, and many thousands of dolphins and whales. These are not the numbers of a precision instrument. They are the numbers of a wall of death that is made of hooks instead of mesh.
If indiscriminate slaughter across oceans was the reason driftnets were outlawed, the case against industrial longlining is stronger. The footprint is larger. The body count is higher.
IV. No-man's-land
What makes both methods so destructive is where they happen. The high seas — the waters beyond any nation's 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone — cover roughly two-thirds of the entire ocean. For most of modern history this immense space has been, in practical terms, ungoverned: too far from any coast to patrol, too fragmented across competing regional bodies to police, too dark to see.
Into that vacuum sailed the distant-water fleets — and they have not left since. China operates by far the largest. Analysis of satellite tracking data by the campaign group Oceana found that some 57,000 Chinese-flagged industrial vessels accounted for around 44 percent of all visible fishing activity worldwide between 2022 and 2024, and roughly 30 percent of all activity on the high seas — fishing in the waters of more than 90 other nations along the way. The dedicated distant-water component of that fleet is officially put at a few thousand vessels but estimated by some investigators to run far higher; a January 2026 report by two U.S. congressional committees, China's Global Fishing Offensive, described a force that behaves less like a commercial industry than an instrument of state power, surged and withdrawn like pieces on a board. China is the largest example, but not the only one. Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Spain all field substantial distant-water fleets of their own.
This is the modern equivalent of the driftnet armada — except larger, better subsidised, and operating in the one part of the planet where almost no one has the authority or the means to stop it.
V. The lie of the line
Here is the part that most people never quite absorb: the fish do not recognise the borders we draw for them.
An Exclusive Economic Zone is a line on a chart, 200 nautical miles from a coast. It is a legal fiction of jurisdiction, and within it a coastal state can, in principle, protect its waters. But tuna, billfish, sharks, and turtles are highly migratory. A bluefin or a bigeye tuna crosses the open Pacific. A leatherback turtle nests on one continent and feeds off another. A blue shark ranges across an entire ocean basin in a single life. These animals pass freely between protected national zones and the lawless high seas — and a fleet waiting just outside a country's boundary line, on the ocean side of an imaginary frontier, intercepts the very same population the coastal nation believes it is conserving.
A border that the fish swims through is not a border at all. It is a courtesy the fish never agreed to.
This is why the distinction between “fishing close to an EEZ” and “fishing the high seas” collapses under examination. The hooks set in the no-man's-land are not catching different fish. They are catching the same fish, on the same migration, a few miles past the point where the map stops protecting them. A border that the fish swims through is not a border at all. It is a courtesy the fish never agreed to.
And then there is the second failure of the EEZ: even where the line is recognised, it is often unpoliced. Many of the coastal states whose waters distant-water fleets fish — Pacific island nations, several West and East African states, parts of South America — hold jurisdiction over vast maritime areas with budgets and patrol fleets a fraction of what would be needed to enforce them. Vanuatu's EEZ runs to roughly 663,000 square kilometres. Kiribati's covers 3.44 million. The Cook Islands has nearly 2 million. In each case the country's national patrol capacity amounts to a single vessel or a handful at most, often donated by Australia or New Zealand under the Pacific Patrol Boat Program, and frequently not at sea on any given day. The right to police the line exists on paper. The capacity to do so, for many of the nations whose waters are being fished, does not.
VI. Flying someone else's flag
There is a further mechanism that makes the line more porous still, and it is almost elegant in its cynicism. A fishing company does not have to slip into a nation's Exclusive Economic Zone uninvited. It can register its vessels under that nation's flag — and then it is invited in.
Across the Pacific, distant-water operators, many of them Chinese-owned, have “flagged in” to small island states: registering vessels under the flags of Vanuatu, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia and others, or signing access agreements that license them to fish those states' waters. A U.S. Congressional Research Service report in 2022 documented Chinese fleets operating in the waters of Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Micronesia by precisely this route. One management company's albacore-longline operation, to take a single example, runs vessels flagged variously to China, Taiwan, Micronesia and Fiji, ranging across the EEZs of the Cook Islands, Micronesia, Fiji and Vanuatu as well as the open high seas. A boat registered in Suva or Port Vila is, on paper, a local boat. Its owners, its catch and its ultimate destination frequently are not.
Vanuatu and Fiji are among the registries most often described by investigators as flags of convenience — jurisdictions that will register a foreign-owned vessel for a fee, far from the oversight of the crew's or the owner's home country. Sometimes the arrangement is formalised at the level of the state itself: in Vanuatu, China's state-owned national fisheries corporation operates a joint venture with the Vanuatu government. The flag state is not an innocent bystander to the fleet flying its colours. It is, in the most literal sense, a business partner.
What the flag is supposed to buy in return is responsibility — the duty to monitor those vessels and account for their catch. In the western and central Pacific, the rules require an independent observer aboard every purse-seine vessel. On longliners, the same regional commission asks for observers on just five percent of trips — meaning 95 percent of fishing activity goes unobserved — a level scientists consider far too low to reveal what the fleet is actually doing, and one that a large share of member states fail even to meet. The remainder is self-reporting: a logbook the crew fills in itself. When a U.S. Coast Guard cutter carried Vanuatu police aboard Chinese flagged-in vessels in Vanuatu's own waters in 2024 — the first such inspection in years — among the breaches they found was the most basic one imaginable: the boats had not been recording their catch at all.
Not every flag operates this way, and the distinction matters. New Zealand, for instance, runs one of the more tightly monitored registries in the region, having rolled out onboard cameras across much of its commercial fleet. The problem is specific: it is the flags that compete to ask the fewest questions. And they are most often the flags of the nations losing the most.
VII. The catch that never comes home
Here is the sharpest part of the deception, and the evidence sits squarely behind it. The reassuring image — a vessel steaming proudly into Suva to land its honest catch on the dock for all to see — is, for much of the fleet, theatre. A longliner can stay at sea for months, sometimes well over a year. It need not return to port at all, because the port comes to it.
The practice is called transshipment. Out near the edges of the EEZs, or across the high seas beyond them, the fishing vessel rendezvous with a large refrigerated cargo ship — a reefer, the mothership — ties up alongside, and offloads its catch. The reefer, gathering fish from many vessels at once, then carries the consolidated haul away to be processed and sold, often thousands of miles from where any of it was caught, and frequently flagged to China, Taiwan or Panama. The smaller fishing vessel, meanwhile, never stops fishing. Whatever it eventually carries into port is only the share it chooses to bring.
Global Fishing Watch, the satellite-monitoring nonprofit, describes transshipment bluntly as something that happens out of sight and reach of authorities, and notes that once catch is mixed aboard a reefer far from any inspector, it becomes trivially easy to blend illegal and unreported fish with legal fish — to launder it before it ever reaches a market. The pattern is most pronounced precisely for the gear this essay concerns: a global study found that longline vessels met reefers flying flags of convenience far more often on the high seas than inside EEZs. Nor are the unaccounted volumes marginal. When the Pew Charitable Trusts compared the transshipments actually reported to the Pacific tuna commission in 2016 against satellite vessel-tracking data, it found roughly a thousand reported against more than fifteen hundred that had likely occurred on the high seas alone — with a separate estimate putting over $140 million of illegal, unreported and unregulated catch moving through transshipment in that single ocean region in one year.
VIII. The cannery that never canned
For the whole of this argument in miniature, let's start in Vanuatu — then look at how the pattern recurs.
A decade ago, China's state-owned national fisheries corporation formed a joint venture with the Vanuatu government — the corporation holding 51 percent of the venture, the state the remaining 49 percent. The promise was a tuna cannery: local processing, local jobs, and revenue for the country beyond the licence fees it already collected from foreign fleets. Vanuatu backed it with public money, including a recurring budget allocation. The cannery was to be built at Salili, near Port Vila. It was the kind of development a small island economy is supposed to want, and it was sold to a sceptical public on exactly those terms.
It has never canned a tin of tuna. A decade on, by the account of the country's own prime minister, the Salili facility has yet to produce a single commercial can for sale or export. What the joint venture does instead is fish: a fleet of more than two dozen Chinese-owned vessels works Vanuatu's waters under the arrangement — and, as Vanuatu's own fisheries officers found when a U.S. Coast Guard cutter finally enabled them to board some of these boats in 2024, the catch does not come home. The vessels work the EEZ and offload in foreign ports, chiefly Fiji, where someone else's plants take the processing and the value. The prime minister has put the loss to Vanuatu at around twenty billion vatu a year (roughly USD 170 million) in foregone revenue, and has begun to talk openly of tearing the agreement up.
What the cannery actually achieves is something the brochure version did not name. It is, in operational terms, a licence-to-fish wrapped in the language of development. The plant — built but never producing a can — has been the cover; the fleet has been the point. And the structure of the joint venture, with the Vanuatu state holding 49 percent of an enterprise it cannot itself operate, has made the country a defender of the very arrangement that depletes its waters. Once a host state is invested, it has standing to lose. It must protect the project to protect what it put in, even as the project produces nothing for it to protect.
The opportunity cost is not measured in foregone licence fees alone. Vanuatu's GDP per capita is around three thousand dollars; aid accounts for more than a fifth of national income; rural schools and clinics are chronically underfunded. Vanuatu's teachers ended an eighteen-month nationwide strike only in December 2025, after the government agreed to a 4.2 billion vatu (roughly USD 35 million) settlement to clear years of unpaid salaries, allowances, and entitlements. Hospital workers had a parallel dispute over their own allowances in the same period. Meanwhile, the public money committed to the cannery — recurring budget allocations sustained for years against a facility that has yet to produce a single can — was not money the country had to spare. The arrangement does not look like development. It looks like a small state being persuaded to capitalise its own dispossession.
When scrutiny finally arrived, the long-promised local product turned out to be a tin of someone else's fish wearing a local label.
There was even a small, almost too-perfect emblem of the whole affair. In 2024, tuna tins bearing the joint venture's label appeared in Port Vila — evidence, it seemed, of the long-promised local product at last. Customs investigators established that they were imported samples from China.
So here is the shape of it, named and dated: a processing plant that processes nothing, presented to the public as jobs and development; a fishing licence that is used in deadly earnest; a catch that departs for another country's docks; and, when scrutiny finally arrives, a tin of someone else's fish wearing a local label. Whether that was the design from the beginning or merely what the arrangement decayed into is a question of intent the public record cannot settle, and an honest account should not pretend otherwise. But the outcome is not in dispute — and it is, increasingly, the stated position of Vanuatu's own government.
The pattern is not Vanuatu's alone. The January 2026 investigation by two U.S. congressional committees found that in both Fiji and Papua New Guinea, Chinese tuna vessels operate through local registration schemes, and identified the model's whole purpose: a fleet that can refuel, resupply, change crews and offload its catch at sea need never submit to the inspection that docking would invite. In Fiji, the same Suva that receives Vanuatu's offloaded tuna has its own reckoning — a Suva-based, Chinese-linked longliner barred from the U.S. market over forced labour, and a stretch of its harbour given over to a graveyard that held as many as forty-four abandoned, mostly Chinese fishing hulks at its peak — still around twenty today, despite Fiji's continuing clean-up — left to rust and leak into the water.
And New Zealand — which earns its scrutiny too — shows both the disease and the one known cure. A decade ago its own Exclusive Economic Zone was worked by foreign-chartered vessels, many Korean-flagged, that were caught dumping high-value fish at sea to maximise quota value, misreporting their catch, obstructing observers, and in the worst cases holding crews in conditions investigators did not flinch from calling slavery; one such vessel sank in 2010 with the loss of six lives. New Zealand's response was the thing almost no one else in this story has managed: from 2016 it required every foreign charter vessel in its waters to be reflagged to New Zealand, dragging them under the full force of its own employment, safety and fisheries law. In one country, the loophole was simply closed. But the supply chain is longer than the loophole — New Zealand still imports fish from China, some of it tied to forced labour in onshore processing. The reform reached the dock. It has not yet reached the kitchen.
IX. Out of sight
The driftnet ban happened, in the end, because people could picture it. The image of a dolphin drowning in a curtain of net was vivid enough to move governments. The genius and the tragedy of industrial longlining is that it produces no such image. It takes place hundreds of miles from any shore, below a surface that shows nothing, on a scale — five million hooks a day, a web across half an ocean — that the imagination cannot hold. As one campaign put it, what happens out at sea happens sight unseen; if we could watch the daily toll, we would demand it stop tomorrow. We don't, so we don't.
The damage is not less real for being unseen. By some estimates the global fishing industry discards tens of millions of tonnes of marine life as bycatch every year — what cannot be sold goes over the side — propped up by roughly $35 billion in annual government subsidies, public money funding the quiet emptying of the commons. It is a slaughter no driftnet fleet ever approached.
X. The reckoning that should follow
There is one reason for cautious hope, and it carries the precedent inside it. On 17 January 2026, the High Seas Treaty — formally the agreement on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction — entered into force, after 60 nations ratified it the previous September. For the first time there is a binding legal framework capable of creating marine protected areas in the two-thirds of the ocean that lay beyond reach. The treaty does not, by itself, regulate fishing — that authority remains with the regional fisheries management bodies whose limitations this essay has just described. What it does is change the playing field: protected zones can now exist on the high seas, and the political will exists, for the first time, to put them there. It is a framework, not yet a fleet of enforcement vessels. Authority is not yet action. But it exists, and that matters.
Because the driftnet ban proved the central point: a destructive method operating across the global commons can be named, condemned, and stopped, even when it is profitable, even when powerful states resist, even when the harm is happening where no voter can see it. It was done once, in 1992, to the walls of death.
XI. Call it what it is
It is tempting, surveying all this, to reach for the language of terrorism. Resist it. These are not terrorists; terrorism is violence meant to coerce a population toward a political end, and what drives these fleets is older and simpler than politics. It is profit. Reaching for the wrong word hands the accused their easiest defence.
Cartel is nearer the mark. The agencies whose actual job is to name such things already use the vocabulary of organised crime. Interpol, after a decade investigating illegal fishing, concluded it is bound up with networks running document fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and the trafficking of drugs and human beings; the United Nations' own drugs-and-crime office files serious fisheries crime in the same family. The honest caution is that the rigorous, case-by-case evidence linking the whole sector to organised crime is thinner than the rhetoric around it. But the cases that have been proven — slave crews, laundered catch, vessels that swap names and flags overnight to shed their pasts — describe something far closer to a transnational criminal enterprise than to an ordinary industry.
There is, now, a precise word for what they do to the ocean itself: ecocide. A serious international campaign is working to make it the fifth crime prosecutable at the International Criminal Court, alongside genocide and crimes against humanity — a charge for the severe, widespread or long-term destruction of the natural world. It is not yet law: the world's conservation union recognised it as a crime in principle only in 2025, and the amendment to the Court's founding statute has not been adopted. And here the system arranges an irony almost too precise to credit. The nation that first stood at the ICC, in 2019, to propose that ecocide be made an international crime was Vanuatu — the same small state whose flag now flies over a fleet that strips its waters and lands the catch somewhere else. A country can be, at once, a conscience of the movement to criminalise the destruction of nature and a doorway through which that destruction is licensed. That is not so much hypocrisy as the exact measure of how little room these states are given, and how much weight the system loads onto its weakest hinge.
And what of crimes against humanity — the phrase the anger reaches for? As a legal term it does not fit; it describes a systematic attack on a civilian population, and overfishing is not that. But strip away the legalism and a humanity-sized harm remains, and it is real. It is the food security of poor coastal nations whose protein is carried off to richer markets. It is the inheritance quietly stolen from every generation that comes after this one. And it is, most literally, the men held in debt bondage with their passports locked in a drawer aboard a boat a thousand miles from any court — not a crime against humanity in the abstract, but against specific human beings, one that the United States has been willing to call slavery and bar from its ports.
So let the piece say plainly what its length has earned the right to say. This is not the sea's bad weather or its bad luck. It is the organised, industrialised, state-shielded plunder of a commons that belongs to everyone and to no one — ecocide carried out for profit, in a legal grey zone that is open for exploitation, by enterprises that have learned to fish effectively out of sight.
The walls never really came down. They were re-rigged with hooks, scaled up, and sailed back out past the edge of the map, into the part of the sea we agreed not to look at. The driftnets were banned because the world was made to look. The only question this essay insists upon is the one we already answered once, in 1992, and have not since found the nerve to answer again: knowing all of this, why do we still allow it?
Sources
Driftnet ban (Opening & I): UN General Assembly Resolution 46/215 (1991); U.S. High Seas Driftnet Fisheries Enforcement Act (1992).
Longline scale (II): “Global prevalence of setting longlines at dawn highlights bycatch risk for threatened albatross,” Biological Conservation (2023); BirdLife International / Global Fishing Watch on longline footprint and scale.
Bycatch (III): BirdLife International on seabird bycatch; Doherty et al., “SharkGuard reduces bycatch of endangered sharks,” Current Biology (2022); Turtle Island Restoration Network on Pacific longline bycatch.
Shark fin trade (III): FAO, State of the Global Market for Shark Products, on Hong Kong as the principal trade hub, China as the principal consumer market, and Indonesia as the world's largest shark producer; Shark Stewards on the shift from release to retention as fin values rose, on RFMO finning bans, and on the “fins naturally attached” loophole; International Seafood Sustainability Foundation on the regulatory architecture and on intentional shark targeting by tuna longline vessels; Gilman et al., “Phylogeny explains capture mortality of sharks and rays in pelagic longline fisheries,” Nature Scientific Reports (2022) on the 71% population decline of pelagic sharks over 50 years.
Distant-water fleets (IV): Oceana, “China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide” (2025); U.S. House Select Committee on the CCP, China's Global Fishing Offensive (January 2026); Indo-Pacific Defense Forum coverage of the report.
EEZ enforcement gap (V): Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map on Vanuatu's 663,200 km² EEZ; Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map on Kiribati's 3.44 million km² EEZ; U.S. State Department, Limits in the Seas No. 153 (Cook Islands); Cook Islands PM's Office, Parliamentary Ministerial Statement on the 2026 Cook Islands–New Zealand Defence and Security Declaration, on the 2-million-km² EEZ and the cooperation arrangement between the Cook Islands Police Maritime Unit and the Royal New Zealand Navy; Australian Department of Defence on the Pacific Maritime Security Program (formerly the Pacific Patrol Boat Program), the source of donated patrol vessels operated by twelve Pacific Forum nations.
Flagging-in & observer coverage (VI): Time, “The Inside Story of China's Vast Illegal Fishing Operation”; U.S. Congressional Research Service (2022) on China's distant-water fleets in the Pacific; International Seafood Sustainability Foundation on WCPFC observer coverage; Reuters via SeafoodSource on the 2024 U.S. Coast Guard / Vanuatu boarding.
Transshipment (VII): The Pew Charitable Trusts on transshipment in the global tuna industry; Global Fishing Watch on at-sea transshipment patterns.
Vanuatu & Sino-Van (VIII): Vanuatu Daily Post on Sino-Van Fisheries and PM Napat's cancellation warning; Islands Business on the Salili cannery; Reuters / Inquirer on the 2024 Vanuatu inspections; Civicus Monitor on the eighteen-month Vanuatu teachers' strike and the parallel hospital workers' allowance dispute; Pacific Scoop / RNZ Pacific on the 4.2 billion vatu collective bargaining settlement; Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map on Vanuatu's GDP per capita and ODA-to-GDP ratio.
Fiji (VIII): SeafoodSource on the Hangton No. 112 forced-labour case; BenarNews on the Suva harbour derelict fleet, documenting the peak of 44 abandoned, mostly Chinese vessels and the early-2025 figure of 25; Fiji Village on the Fiji Ports Corporation's March 2026 progress update, putting the current count at 20 and confirming 13 removed in 2025 and 7 more since January 2026.
New Zealand (VIII): NZ Herald on China's fishing tactics and the NZ supply chain; Stuff on the foreign-charter-vessel scandal; Brandeis Schuster Institute on FCVs in New Zealand.
Subsidies & bycatch totals (IX): WTO on global fisheries subsidies; Pew Charitable Trusts on harmful subsidies and the Sumaila et al. Marine Policy study.
High Seas Treaty (X): IUCN on the 60 ratifications and entry-into-force trigger; High Seas Alliance on the BBNJ Agreement's entry into force on 17 January 2026.
Organised crime & ecocide (XI): Interpol on fisheries crime; UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Transnational Organized Crime in the Fishing Industry (2011); Stop Ecocide International on Vanuatu's 2019 ICC proposal; IUCN on Motion 061, “Recognising the crime of ecocide to protect nature”, adopted at the 2025 World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi.
Further Reading
This essay argues a position. Readers who want to test that position against alternative framings — from industry, from sustainability bodies, from fisheries economists, and from the affected fishing communities themselves — will find the following starting points useful. Reasonable people in this field disagree, sometimes strongly. The goal here is to give the curious reader the full set of voices.
The industry view on tuna longlining and sustainability: International Seafood Sustainability Foundation. A multi-stakeholder body that includes major tuna processors, scientists, and WWF, working on science-based stock assessments and best practices. Reflects an industry-engaged sustainability framing rather than an environmental-advocacy one.
The certified-sustainable framing: Marine Stewardship Council on tuna fisheries. The MSC certifies fisheries as sustainable; tuna longline operations carry MSC certifications in some cases. Readers should know what the certification means, what it does not cover, and how the system has been critiqued by environmental groups.
Fisheries economics and the management debate: UN Food and Agriculture Organization — State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture. The FAO's biennial report is the authoritative global data set on fishery status, including stocks the essay treats as collapsed or fully exploited. The report's framing differs from environmental advocacy in important ways; reading it alongside the essay's sources gives a fuller picture.
Regional fisheries management organisations — primary documents: Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. The actual bodies that manage Pacific tuna fisheries. Their conservation and management measures, observer coverage rules, and enforcement records are publicly available and worth reading directly rather than only through advocacy summaries.
Pacific Island governments' own perspectives: Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency. The collective body representing seventeen Pacific Island countries on tuna fisheries. Their position on distant-water fleets, license fees, and sovereign rights is articulated firsthand rather than through Western press coverage.
The Chinese fishing industry's position: Chinese government policy statements on distant-water fishing and FAO country profiles including China's distant-water fleet operations. Coverage in this essay and in Western press generally frames China's distant-water fleet as the central problem. China and Chinese industry sources frame the issues differently. Readers should be able to examine both framings.
Independent investigative work on global fisheries: The Outlaw Ocean Project. Ian Urbina's long-running investigative project covers labour, environmental, and criminal dimensions of high-seas fishing globally. Detailed reporting on practices the essay touches on, with extensive primary documentation.
For perspectives from fishing communities themselves: World Forum of Fisher Peoples. A federation of small-scale fishing organisations representing fishing communities worldwide. Their analysis of how industrial fishing affects small-scale livelihoods sits outside both the industry view and the environmental-NGO view, and is worth reading on its own terms.