China's heavily state subsidized fishing fleet has been trashing South America's ample fishing beds, depleting fish stocks and leaving trash all over the place.

According to a report from Breitbart News, citing EFE:

The persistent threat of an invasive fleet of illegal Chinese fishing ships in Latin American waters is depleting fish stocks and impacting the regional economy, according to a report published on Sunday by the Spanish news agency EFE.

The constant presence of illegal Chinese ships and their consequences to the local fauna and economy have generated great concern among regional authorities, who are making efforts to curb the destruction of their respective countries’ natural resources. EFE’s report gathered testimonies from Chilean, Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Argentine authorities.

The Breitbart report, taken from EFE. describes how little regard China has for other peoples' waters, dragging big industrial trawling nets through the coastal waters and scooping up absolutely every living thing in the water. edible, non-edible, and lots of waste. Do that a lot, and it doesn't take long for waters to become overfished and barren of life. 

The report says that China's targeted countries include Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, all famous for their seafood -- and not particularly powerful countries, unlike, say, Brazil. But messing with these countries is disgusting to hear of. Civilization developed on the continent itself through Peru precisely because of its fishing waters, and Ecuador's Galapagos Islands are well known for their unique flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth.

According to the report, this illegal overfishing -- poaching, really -- brings on phenomena like red tides, which kill everything in the water and make coastlines stink with rotting biological matter, as well as leave a trail of economic devastation given that local fishermen cut off from their own fishing grounds. And to top it off, the illegal Chinese fishing boats leave a lot of trash in the ocean around the Galapagos in particular, the report said, polluting it exactly as one would expect a criminal organization to do. (FARC's Marxist narcoterrorists, for example, were famous for polluting the Colombian jungle with their illegal cocaine-making operations and America's fragile Southwest corrider is a trash-strewn disaster owing to cartel human-smuggling activity.)

The report describes a bad situation but doesn't get to the half of how bad it is.

Number one, this is the result of China vastly expanding its fishing fleet in the 1980s after messing up their own coastal waters.

According to Paul G. Harris, writing for the Hong Kong Free Press back in 2002:

By the 1980s, widespread devastation of China’s national fisheries prompted the government to push fishers to set sail for far-off waters. China’s distant-water fleet has ventured to all seven seas, and the waters of more than 90 countries, fishing a far larger area than any other country’s fleet. The Chinese fleet comprises up to 17,000 vessels, up from only 13 in 1985 and more than five times the official cap on vessels set by the Chinese government. (For comparison, the American distant-water fleet comprises less than 300 vessels.)

 Now they're messing up everyone else's, too:

The rise of China over the last several decades has been accompanied by adverse impacts on the global environment, ranging from plastic pollution and destruction of the world’s forests to emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. The world’s fisheries have also suffered the effects of China’s rise.

Those fisheries are in crisis. According to the United Nations, almost 90 percent of marine fish stocks are “fully exploited, overexploited or depleted.” The global fish catch has been declining since the 1980s, coinciding with a rapid growth in China’s distant-water fishing fleet. That fleet devastates marine ecosystems, harms poor countries and creates insecurity.

 Obviously, they don't respect their neighbors nor any of the international treaties they're signatories to. They just go pirate-style, or colonial-master-style, to the fisheries they want in other countries and scarf up their catch, leaving their trash behind.

Don't think the government isn't behind it, either. According to the Hong Kong Free Press report:

“The Chinese government promotes overfishing around the world by helping to pay for the building of large long-range trawlers, providing fleets with forecasts of where and when certain species are most prevalent around the world, and providing tax exemptions and extensive subsidies, notably for fuel,” writes Paul G. Harris.

They're quite the neighbors, and sea territory is very hard for these nations, or any nations, to defend, though the EFE report does cite incidences of where they're trying.

Obviously, this is the result of China's government's failure to maintain their own national fisheries and inland waterways, allowing for all manner of ghost cities and other real estate monstrosities to go up, while polluting the fragile ecosystem right out of the local food supply. Now they're going full plunder on others instead of devising and developing ways of conserving and sustaining their own natural resources, which ought to be their priority. For a supposedly socialist communist system such as they have, they sure do promote a lot of greed at the expense of the environment. And of course, no one, not the pope, not Joe Biden, not Brazil, not the United Nations, not many places of so-called power, dares call these greedheads trashing other people's fishing grounds out. China says it's all in for going green, despite the statistics about its internal pollution, but they're the opposite of that and now they're spreading their devastation to other countries. It's disgusting,

It gets worse when one considers that China is big on using its fishing fleets as spying operations. Obviously, they're spying on Argentina, Chile, Peru and Ecuador, and for military purposes, while leaving allied nations like Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil alone. The spying is likely with the ultimate target the U.S., so it wouldn't hurt if the U.S. teamed up with the damaged states and invoked the Monroe Doctrine, telling China to get the hell out.

Won't happen, of course, with Joe Biden in the saddle, he's probably compromised by China himself. But if and when President Trump returns in triumph, he would do well to give this clearly nefarious string of invasive happenings from China the big warning.  

Image: Siyuwj, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED