‘They are raping the Galapagos’: Chinese fishing boats, Covid-19 threaten Ecuador’s Unesco site
- By some estimates, China has a ‘distant water’ fleet of 17,000 vessels that has been involved in fishing conflicts off the coast of Ecuador
- Without visitors travelling to the outer islands, no one is watching for poaching or picking up the litter and plastic floating in from the mega-fleets
Just south of the Galapagos’ Marchena Island, there’s a dive spot known by locals as the “fish arena.”
There, within the choppy, cool waters of the Pacific, thousands of colourful fish swim in schools, lobsters poke their long antennae out of rocky outcrops, dolphins bear their young, and moray eels gape menacingly at visitors who swim too close.
Earlier this summer, more than 300 Chinese fishing vessels – many designed to hold 1,000 tonnes of catch – waited at the marine preserve’s border, ready to snatch up sea life as it migrated south toward the waters off Peru and Chile.
“This is an attack on our resources,” said Angel Yanez Vinueza, the mayor of Santa Cruz canton, the Galapagos’ equivalent of a province. “They are killing the species we have protected and polluting our biota with the plastic waste they drop overboard. They are raping the Galapagos.”