Lawmakers urge European Commission to take on China’s ‘deplorable’ fishing practices
- European parliament’s fisheries panel calls China’s distant-water fleet a threat to ‘viability of the European fisheries sector’
- At World Trade Organization, EU also criticises bans China, Hong Kong and Macau have placed on Japanese seafood products
Europe is confronting China on futuristic fronts from artificial intelligence to quantum computing, but lawmakers are also pushing Brussels to take on an altogether ancient resource: fish.
In a debate on Monday night, members of the European Parliament railed against China’s industrial fishing practices, asking the union’s secretariat, the European Commission, to do more to counter behaviour described as “deplorable”.
Several members cited labour conditions on Chinese vessels, with some referring to recent media reports about industrial-scale use of Uygur forced labour on fishing vessels. Others cited alleged subsidies in China’s fishing industry for distorting the global supply chain.
The parliament will vote on Tuesday on a resolution that claims that opacity and subsidies in China’s fishing industry “severely undermines the competitiveness of the EU single market”.
Did you know that part of the fish from forced labour among Uygurs ends up on our plates?
“This has severe economic and labour repercussions for companies in the sector and throughout the supply chain,” the resolution said.