Squid caught in abusive conditions may end up on US and European plates. Photo / 123RF
China’s vast, uncontrolled squid-fishing effort in the unregulated waters off South America is putting marine ecosystems at risk of depletion and leaving crew members vulnerable to physical abuse, overwork and even death, according to a new report by the Environmental Justice Foundation.
The investigation by the London-based non-profit sheds light on the working conditions of largely Southeast Asian crews and murky fishing supply chains that link to more than 80 US importers and buyers.
It’s highly likely that squid from these ships ends up as calamari on American and European dinner plates.
EJF identified 187 buyers or importers linked to squid-fishing ships implicated in physical abuse or worker deaths, with nearly 45% of them based in the United States, although it stopped short of naming them in the report.
Much of the Chinese squid fishing that the EJF examined occurred just beyond Argentina’s “exclusive economic zone,” or EEZ, the official perimeter where it has legal jurisdiction, leaving the fleet with little regulation or oversight.
“The litany of human rights abuses is absolutely shocking,” said Dominic Thomson, director of EJF’s squid fisheries project.
“It’s an incredibly sad story of the plight of these workers coming from Indonesia and [the] Philippines, whereby they are being abused, working in terrible conditions, and then having their hard-earned and often very meagre salary being taken away from them.”
The report, published yesterday, aims to counter the “complete lack of transparency in these fishing operations” and “expose the scale and the severity of the illegal fishing and the human rights abuses happening onboard these vessels”.
China is estimated to have the world’s largest distant water fishing fleet – a term referring to fishing in the high seas or in other countries’ waters – with more than 2500 ships catching more than 2.5 million tonnes of seafood annually, according to an official 2023 white paper on Chinese fisheries.
This industry supplies both China’s massive domestic seafood demand as well as overseas markets.
Squid fishing in particular has surged in recent years: China is now the leading squid-fishing nation in the world, accounting for about a third of the total global catch, according to EJF, which also advocates for environmental and human rights issues.
China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, which oversees fisheries, did not respond to a request for comment.
China’s fishing dominance is the result of a “perfect storm” of contributing factors, said Sara Nix, a natural resources security analyst at the Washington-based non-profit C4ADS who was not involved in the EJF report.
These include China’s first-class shipyards as well as abundant access to labour and funding. Seafood is “a staple food for them, but it’s also a staple economic product”, she added.
EJF investigated China’s shortfin squid-fishing fleet off the coast of Argentina by interviewing more than 160 Indonesian and Filipino crew members, participating in an Argentine coast guard expedition in March, and combing through open-source data on vessel ownership and movement.
The report also included research on Taiwanese and South Korean vessels, though Chinese boats are a far larger presence in the area.
On the Chinese vessels operating near Argentina, crew members reported experiencing physical violence, including hitting or strangulation.
They also reported regularly working more than 14 hours per day, as well as having their identity documents confiscated by senior crew members and wages withheld.
EJF’s interviews also revealed five crew member deaths on four Chinese vessels in the southwest Atlantic because of health issues and other unexplained circumstances.
In total, physical violence or deaths onboard occurred on 29 Chinese vessels, or two-thirds of the Chinese squid vessels identified by EJF, according to the report.
Many of these vessels remain at sea for months or even years – making it hard for crew members to escape dangerous situations.
“A lot of these deaths were really preventable … if the vessel captain had wanted to just stop fishing and make sure that these cases could be brought to port,” Thomson said.
The report echoes previous findings about labour conditions and illicit activity on Chinese distant water fishing vessels by other investigative groups such as the Outlaw Ocean Project and C4ADS.
In 2022, the US Treasury Department placed sanctions on two individuals and a network of Chinese distant water fishing companies over “serious human rights abuse”.
But international outcry hasn’t always led to changing conditions aboard these vessels, EJF found.
In 2020, an Indonesian crew member died on the Lu Huang Yuan Yu 118, a squid-fishing vessel owned by Qingdao Zhongtai Oceanic Fisheries Co.
The death resulted in international media coverage and a Chinese supervisor going to trial in Indonesia in the crew member’s death. The supervisor was acquitted on the death charge.
Even after that incident, however, EJF found that two more crew members died on the same vessel in 2024 while operating in the Pacific Ocean.
One Indonesian worker died after falling overboard while setting up vessel lights, and a Chinese cook fell ill and died during the voyage.
These findings were not included in yesterday’s report because they fall outside of the southwest Atlantic geography.
Qingdao Zhongtai did not respond to a request for comment.
The 45-year-old sister of the deceased Indonesian crew member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that her brother knew about the previous death aboard the ship but “insisted on going back to the vessel because he needed the money”.
In an interview with the Washington Post organised and translated by EJF, she described her brother as a “principled” man, and said his fishing job paid better than his previous job harvesting rubber in Indonesia. He was saving up to send his mother on an Islamic pilgrimage, she said.
The unregulated nature of the area just beyond Argentina’s jurisdiction also opens the door to environmental damage.
The average Chinese squid fleet’s fishing hours in the area doubled from 2019 to 2024, according to EJF, placing intense pressure on the environment and raising the risk of overfishing in the shortfin squid population, which underpins key marine food chains.
It’s not only squid that are put at risk by the sprawling fleet in unsupervised waters, the report found.
Crew members reported seals being killed and sharks having their fins removed – likely for shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy – before their bodies were thrown back into the water.
EJF’s Thomson said he hopes the report leads to tighter scrutiny on squid imports into the US and Europe – making “high-risk squid from these areas unpalatable” – as well as greater accountability for incidents like crew deaths.
The sister of the Indonesian man who died said that it took more than two months for her brother’s body to be returned to the family, and that many of his belongings were never returned. The family did receive some compensation, which she said she used to take her mother on the pilgrimage her brother had been saving for.
“That’s what he wanted for his mother,” she said.