The Chinese vessels - nearly 800 in 2019- appear to be in violation of United Nations sanctions that forbid foreign fishing in North Korean waters.
Last year, more than 150 of these macabre vessels washed ashore in Japan, and there have been more than 500 in the past five years.įor years the grisly phenomenon mystified Japanese police, whose best guess was that climate change pushed the squid population further from North Korea, driving the country’s desperate fishermen dangerous distances from shore, where they become stranded and die from exposure.īut an investigation based on new satellite data and conducted by an international team of academic researchers Ian Urbina, a former New York Times investigative reporter who now directs The Outlaw Ocean Project and Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit organization that specializes in the use of satellite technology and artificial intelligence to track illegal activities on the high seas have revealed what marine researchers say is a more likely explanation: China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, violently displacing smaller North Korean boats and spearheading a decline in once-abundant squid stocks of more than 70 percent. The battered wooden "ghost boats" drift through the Sea of Japan for months, their only cargo the corpses of starved North Korean fishermen whose bodies have been reduced to skeletons.
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