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Far too often, governments behave like toddlers. They’re fickle. They don’t like to share. And good luck getting them to pay attention to any problem that isn’t directly in front of them. They like to push each other to the brink, and often do. But when they don’t, it’s usually because other people enter the proverbial room. Private citizens who step up and play peacemaker when their governments won’t or can’t. People who strive for collaboration and understanding, and sometimes end up finding it in unlikely places. Those people and the work they do, they’re the reason we’re all still here.
This season, we’ll hear from scientists, analysts, and idealists who have gone to crazy lengths just for a shot at making peace and building understanding From smoke-filled rooms in North Korea to secret labs in the Soviet Union… to the lawless seas, and even to the depths of outer space (or, at least, the conference rooms where they talk about the depths of outer space). This podcast tells the stories about the people holding us back from the brink.
Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies faculty. Previously, he served as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com, a leading resource on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Produced by Gilded Audio and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The Reason We’re All Still Here
Episode 4: Gone Illegal Fishing
Transcript v3.3_FINAL
COLD OPEN
[00:00]
SFX—waves on shore
[CLIP: NK GHOST SHIPS]
[0:40-0:57]
REPORTER: Along the coast, 42 bodies in 12 months, some just skeletons … making some people suspicious of spies and defectors aboard the ghostly ships filled with secrets.
In 2011, the Japanese Coast Guard began to track a disturbing phenomenon. Small fishing boats, dubbed “ghost ships,” kept washing up on Japan’s western shore.
JAEYOON: It’s a very shabby, half-broken ships that washed ashore and sometimes it brings some human bodies in it, sometimes empty.
MUS
That’s Jaeyoon Park of Global Fishing Watch, a non-profit that says its goal is to build an open-access picture of global fishing activity.
It was estimated that these “ghost ships” had traveled more than 600 miles,
[01:00]
and could have been at sea for weeks. Japanese authorities were mystified, but they did have a few clues:
JAEYOON: Small artisanal boats washing up on Japanese shores with North Korean marks on the boat… and obviously, there are some Korean words on the deck…then you can easily imagine where these vessels are coming from.
The ghost ships came from North Korea, on the other side of the sea that’s sometimes known as the Sea of Japan, and which Koreans call the East Sea. It's not exactly easy to get information out of North Korea. So nobody could explain why they had crossed the sea. Or why there were so many of them.
104 ghost ships were reported in 2017. 89 in 2018. The next year, no fewer than
[2:00]
156. And these are just the boats that were found, to say nothing of the ones that never made it to land at all. A few boats even ended up on Russian beaches.
And it wasn’t the only mystery going on in these waters at the time.
JAEYOON: The South Korean Coast Guard observed every year that vessels from Chinese waters cross South Korean waters to head to North Korean waters every year. And it's very many vessels, hundreds of vessels …
International law allows foreign vessels to transit another nation’s territorial waters as long as they don’t get too close to land and they don’t extract resources. So there was nothing inherently illegal about these massive Chinese fleets. But there was also no explanation of why they were sailing into North Korean waters.
Whatever was
[3:00]
going on, it was clear that no government was in control of it, at least not openly. It turns out, that’s true of a lot of what happens at sea. Our planet’s oceans are so vast that they can seem limitless, offering up infinite resources… but they’re not. And as the limits of these resources become more and more apparent, the people who extract them become increasingly desperate to take what they can, while they can.
MUS out
MONTAGE
UNKNOWN: If you have a vast resource and it’s easy to take, then it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “well, this, this is limitless.”
ANDREA: This is why vaquitas are dying. This is why lot of species from the upper gulf of California are in danger. This is
[04:00]
what is fueling the entire operation.
UNKNOWN 3: The industry will call by-catch “Accidental take” but there’s nothing accidental about by-catch. It’s factored into the economics of fishing.
I. PLENTY OF FISH IN THE SEA
You’ve certainly heard the cliché “there’s plenty of fish in the sea?” Frankly I have my doubts but I am reliably informed that there really have been enough fish in the sea for most of human existence.
SARA: For a long time… the number of fish catches globally kept going up and up and up, and it seemed like there was no limit, right, to how many fish could be caught.
That’s Sara Mitchell, a professor of political science at the University of Iowa. She says that,
[05:00]
up until the 1950s, international law regarding who could take what from the seas was pretty… rudimentary.
SARA: The customary law principle was that countries had territorial sea rights for three nautical miles offshore. And this is because this was the distance that a cannon could fire.
“I own as far as I can shoot.” A brilliant legal principle.
MUS
But by 1945 it was the missile age. Just about every country with a coastline was claiming exclusive rights to the resources within 200 miles of its shores.
SARA: You also had a lot of pressure by major powers that were seafaring like the United Kingdom and the United States. They wanted to have a freedom of the seas, and so they pressed for, right, the ability of their global fleets to move freely about.
Today, the 200-mile rule is official. It’s called an exclusive economic zone, or EEZ. Within its EEZ, every nation
[06:00]
has the sovereign right to determine who can extract resources, and what they can extract. There’s even a system of international courts in place for countries to settle disputes over these areas and their resources.
SARA: We see a really high record of success, so when countries have taken maritime or land border disputes to international courts, they have complied with the court's judgments 95% of the time.
And there you have it—the governments of the world came together and found a diplomatic way to divvy up the ocean’s endless bounty.
MUS OUT
SARA: The problem is that countries only use those courts in about 4% of all of the ways they try to settle their issues, so…
Four percent, huh? Yeah, sounds about right
SARA: Maybe all international organizations are what we call self-enforcing, meaning
[07:00]
there is no police force that will make sure that these agreements are carried out. So in that way, countries have to agree to carry them out themselves.
Apart from the navies and coast guards of individual countries, there's no real law enforcement on the ocean. Now, add to that general lawlessness the pressure that Earth’s ballooning population has placed on ocean resources.
SARA: Essentially in the nineties we sort of hit this carrying capacity. And then overall global fishing amounts started to decline.
In a perfect world, hitting our oceans’ carrying capacity would spark an international conversation, the first step toward an equitable and sustainable approach to fishing. We don’t live in that world. Instead, it’s a global competition for a finite set of resources. And while there are technically rules governing this competition, nobody’s
[08:00]
really enforcing them.
SARA: There's a hundred thousand plus pounds of wild caught fish that are lost every minute to illegal fishing, so… About 25% of global fishing harvest in total come from illegal fishing, so we’re talking $30 plus billion in revenue.
II. CHASING GHOSTS
With so much of the Earth’s oceans un-policed, it’s hard to even think of where to begin. And that’s why we talked to Jaeyoon Park, a man after my own heart.
JAEYOON: Yeah, I use a lot of satellite data…
But in addition to sharing my own predilection for satellite imagery, Jaeyoon is also a conservationist. And he combines those interests in his work for Global Fishing Watch.
Jaeyoon uses satellites to investigate shady behavior on the high seas. Which made him the perfect person to take up the investigation into the ghost ships and the mysterious fleet off the coast of Korea.
[09:00]
JAEYOON: So obviously we started with AIS data.
AIS stands for the ship’s automatic identification system. AIS transponders are devices that “ping” at regular intervals, broadcasting the position of big ships on the open ocean. Looking at those pings is a great way to count the number of vessels in a given area… or at least, the number of vessels that don’t mind being counted.
JAEYOON: The only problem is that when fishing vessels don't use … these devices or they just intentionally turn it off.
You might think turning off your AIS transponder makes your ship effectively invisible to anyone who can’t lay eyes on it. But the very act of turning off an AIS transponder, or “going dark,” is actually itself a really important clue.
JAEYOON: And it happens quite often around boundaries,
[10:00] EEZ boundaries. Then you don't know what they did, but still it's a very interesting case why that happened, why that happened around EEZ boundaries, why that happened around certain fleets.
And this was the first big clue as to what the hell was going on. As the unidentified fleet was about to enter North Korea's EEZ, they all turned off their AIS transponders. The fleet went completely dark.
That’s fishy.
Jaeyoon and his team had identified a potential crime scene. And thanks to satellite imagery, they had photos of that crime scene too…
JAEYOON: To address the gaps, we brought satellite imagery, satellite radar, and nightlight detection data sets.
Jaeyoon had access to all manner of satellite photos, but that really
[11:00]
only got him so far. It is a big ocean out there, and the vast majority of satellite images show… nothing, just a lot of water. But by looking at images of the ships in South Korean waters, before they went dark, Jaeyoon could learn a lot of information that would help them locate the boats later. For one thing, they could tell what kinds of ships they were.
JAEYOON: There are actually two types of vessels we identified, through various satellite data. They correspond to the types of vessels we often see from Chinese fishermen.
One, the most common type, are known as pair trawlers: two boats dragging the same net behind them, moving in a coordinated and pretty distinctive manner. The second type is known as a “lighting vessel,” a boat equipped with powerful floodlights that lure sea animals like squid to the surface. Pair trawlers’ distinctive way of moving
[12:00]
allowed Jaeoyoon to train a neural network in how to detect them. And as for the lighting vessels, well…
JAEYOON: So they have to use light at night, and you can see those lights...And then you can count how many are, and where they are, even if they don't use AIS.
JEFFREY: The lights must be quite large then.
JAEYOON: Oh yeah. I mean, they use very bright light… It's as bright as a small stadium, the football stadium. And then you can see it from space quite easily.
JEFFREY: That's amazing. I had no idea that they fished with such bright lights. That's incredible.
JAEYOON: It's so bright that, you know, some fishermen described it's like a floating city.
AIS pings told Jaeyoon how many ships there were. The fact that those ships turned off their AIS transponders told him they were up to no good. And now
[13:00]
that he knew some of their distinctive features: How they moved and the fact that some of them used lights at night, he was able to comb through satellite imagery until he found what he was after: Pair trawlers and lighting ships, caught in the act, fishing illegally in North Korean waters.
In a job like ours, you can spend months, even years, painstakingly looking for something that you’re not even sure is even there, so I cannot tell you how amazing it feels to actually see the thing you’re looking for.
JAEYOON: I very vividly still remember the moment, the first moment that I saw the existence of this dark fleet in North Korea…
A Chinese fleet — a floating city — operating in secret, harvesting squid from North Korea’s exclusive economic zone.
JAEYOON: I couldn't believe my eyes because
[14:00] the scale of the fleet was incredible. I found the pair trawlers in North Korean waters, all in a very dense group operating in, all in the same direction. You can see the wakes behind all these vessels.
JEFFREY: So are you like working from home when you're doing this?
JAEYOON: Oh, yes, it was in my room when I first saw it…
JEFFREY: So you're like in your pajamas and you have like a cup of coffee or tea or something and you're…?
JAEYOON: Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, that describes it. And I was like my jaw dropped and, okay. I wanted to share it with somebody else.
JEFFREY: Wait, so you live by yourself?
JAEYOON: With my wife.
JEFFREY: You didn't show your wife?!
JAEYOON: Well, I showed it to my wife later, but it was confidential in a way.
For what it’s worth, I think you’re allowed to share something like this with your spouse. But hey, it’s his discovery and he can handle it anyway
[15:00]
he wants.
Looking at three years of data, it became clear that the dark fleet was conducting a massive illegal squid-fishing operation in North Korean waters. What Jaeyoon had discovered was way bigger than what he’d anticipated.
JAEYOON: I had to scroll up and down and left to right, for quite some time, to realize how large on Earth the size of the fleet was … You have thousands of vessels operating all at once in unison. It was quite a scene even on a computer screen … I can imagine how spectacular it would have been on the water and how much squid they would have raked in, in each operation.
BEAT
JAEYOON: And it is estimated that they caught roughly the same amount of squid as South Korean and Japan combined, worth more than about 700 million dollars between
[16:00]
2017 and 2020.
This is believed to be the largest illegal fishing operation ever uncovered. Illegal squid-fishing boats from China had harvested so much squid from North Korean waters that they had depleted the entire population.
MUS
And this, in turn, solved the mystery of the ghost ships. Because with a secret but massive fleet of ships devastating the local squid population, individual North Korean fishermen were forced to venture further and further out, to try to find their own catch.
JAEYOON: They have to venture out further and fish illegally in other countries’ waters and then their fate as you can see, that many people, fishermen, you know, artisanal fishermen die in the sea.
JEFFREY: So the dead fishermen and the ghost ships are evidence of illegal fishing, but they aren't the ones who were doing the illegal
[17:00]
fishing. They're actually being displaced by this giant Chinese fleet.
JAEYOON: Yeah, exactly … That's the core part of this tragedy. They are displaced and they're driven out of their own fishing ground by this industrial fleet.
China’s exact role in this is murky. The government almost certainly knows about these ships, but how much it knows, and how much it codones, is unclear. But after Jaeyoon’s study, the number of ships has started to drop.
JAEYOON: Our preliminary analysis in 2021 and 22 shows that the number of illegal vessels has dramatically decreased in the early fishing season of these years. And consequently, the number of ghost boats has dropped.
[18:00]
Jaeyoon and his team showed that it's possible to enforce laws on the high seas.
JAEYOON: So there's a huge vacuum of information in the oceans and human activities in the ocean … So we want to shed light on this activity. We are curious. We wanna know. I mean, we have a right to know, right? We should know what's happening in the oceans.
SFX—waves
[MIDROLL]
III. BOOTS ON THE GROUND
ANDREA: I come from Italy. We are the masters of creating new laws and then not following them.
[19:00]
That’s Andrea Crosta. Around the same time that Jaeyoon was tracking the dark fleet off the coast of Japan, on the other side of the Pacific, Andrea and his team were confronting another crime against the environment. If Global Fishing Watch serves as mother nature’s eye in the sky, Andrea’s organization, Earth League International, is more like the boots on the ground.
MUS
ANDREA: You can have images of what is happening at a seaport, for example, you know, all the ships going in and out, containers and everything. We are the guys who send an undercover team to the port to sniff around and ask questions about investors and who does what and who belongs to, who was the owner and this and that. So this is a different kind of intelligence.
Andrea has a background in law enforcement, as well as a lot of passion. He founded Earth League International because, too often, nobody enforces environmental laws.
ANDREA: Environmental crime is the fourth largest criminal enterprise in the world. Billions of dollars
[20:00]
and so I drop everything and I said, okay, I'm gonna try to build the first intelligence agency for Earth.
To build it, Andrea says he turned to actual intelligence agents.
ANDREA: I had those contacts and I reached out to them and I told them, listen, I have the most important war you ever fought in your life. It's not about, it's not against terrorist, it is not about El Chapo or Pablo Escobar, it is the future of our planet. Are you up to it? And yes, they were up to it, and that was the beginning of everything.
MUS OUT
IV “YOU DON’T NEED HOPE”
In 2016, ELI exposed a network of poachers and ivory dealers stretching from East Africa to Vietnam and into China. The following year, they launched a new investigation in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez… not all that far from Monterey, California, home of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where I work.
MUS
The Sea of Cortez is famous for its biological diversity. Jacques Cousteau
[21:00]
once referred to it as “the world’s aquarium.” But in recent years, it’s also become known as the site of what Andrea calls a major environmental crime. Even though it was outlawed in Mexico in the early 1970s, local fishermen continue to hunt an endangered fish known as the totoaba.
ANDREA: Totoaba is a really big and strong fish. So they use really big and strong nets, illegal gill nets. And those illegal gill nets kill pretty much anything, you know … I've seen with my eyes, whales and sharks and turtles, and even seabirds. They're killing machines.
ANDREA: They're not interested in the fish itself. They're interested in the swim bladder of this fish, because according to traditional Chinese medicine, it has medicinal properties
The Chinese market demands totoaba, presenting Mexican fishermen with a big opportunity.
ANDREA: Fishermen in Baja California usually make
[22:00]
$600 a month fishing shrimps and other fish. Okay? All of a sudden there is one swim bladder, $3 - 4,000. The same swim bladders in Asia, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam goes for 25, 30, 35, 50, $70,000 a piece once it's dried out.
MUS OUT
Look, I get it. If a single totoaba can fetch four grand, there will always be someone willing to fish for it. But what about the people paying that poacher? The ones turning around and selling the swim bladders for tens of thousands of dollars?
ANDREA: The most important mistake in my opinion was to, for 10 years, more than 10 years, to focus only on the illegal fishermen and not at all on the trafficking part.
The traffickers were the ones making the entire illegal enterprise possible, so they became the targets of ELI’s
[23:00]
investigation. That kind of job is not for the faint of heart, which is why Andrea employs people with experience conducting sophisticated intelligence operations.
ANDREA: I cannot give you a lot of details about our trade craft, but sometimes we are able to become friends with these people … and start a relationship with them over, over the course of months and years. We get so much trust from these people that very often they start telling us stuff without us asking …
Through undercover agents, and at least one informant from within the organization, ELI discovered the people running the poaching operation were locals with experience in organized crime.
ANDREA: And they explain us, you know, how the illegal supply chain works. In the case of the totoaba in the Sea of Cortez, this is how we understood how the cartels in Baja, California work with fishing cooperatives and they deal with the first part of the illegal supply chain.
Cartel members
[24:00]
were paying the fishermen, and in some cases even threatening them, to poach the totoaba instead of going after other, legal catch. They were also paying authorities to look the other way. You know, typical cartel stuff.
SFX - Sonar pings
The poaching was taking place in Mexico, but to expose the full magnitude of the crime, ELI had teams on both sides of the Pacific.
ANDREA: We try to follow these people all the way to Asia and collect information about every single step of this illegal supply chain.
ELI caught a few breaks. In 2018, authorities in Hong Kong arrested two men who had just flown from Mexico with 95 totoaba swim bladders in their checked luggage… I can only imagine how that smelled… The authorities allowed Andrea and his team to inspect the findings, confirming
[25:00]
that they were on the right track. In another case, an ELI agent simply asked a shopkeeper where the bladders they were selling came from. The shopkeeper said that they were from Mexico, and they arrived in China hidden inside of other fish.
MUS
When they had all the facts they needed, from both sides of the Pacific, ELI turned their information over to law enforcement—a risky proposition when a sizable portion of the police are already on the cartel’s payroll. Andrea says that’s why ELI went to American authorities first.
Eventually, armed with ELI’s intelligence, the Americans worked with Mexican officials to crack down on the totoaba traffickers. And in 2018, Mexican authorities arrested Oscar Parra, allegedly a cartel hitman nicknamed the “Totoaba Tzar” for his prominent role in the poaching operation. More arrests have followed, including several cartel members and a Chinese national whom ELI
[26:00]
had identified as the leader of the trafficking operation.
MUS out
BEAT
Overfishing the totoaba was already a major environmental crime. But there’s a kicker.
Remember how Andrea said he’s seen all kinds of marine life get caught up in the gill nets used to catch totoaba? Sadly, that’s often true of the vaquita porpoise, the world’s smallest whale.
Since the rise in totoaba poaching, gill nets have trapped and killed vaquitas at a horrifying rate. Between 2011 and 2016, 90 percent of the population was killed. All as a byproduct of a different environmental crime.
MUS
[27:00]
When we spoke, Andrea had just returned from the Galapagos. He’s going to keep fighting environmental crime, just as Jaeyoon is going to keep fighting illegal fishing..…and just as my colleagues and I are going to keep fighting the spread of nuclear weapons.
JAEYOON: I'm still positive and I'm still hopeful that, uh, we can make, um, you know, right changes, the right timing, uh, with uh, with collaboration, with data and, you know, like with like-minded people.
JEFFREY: I’m curious, are you optimistic about our ability to address these problems, or the willingness of governments to eventually address these problems? Or, or not? I mean, where are you on, like how, how screwed are we?
ANDREA: I think we are screwed, but I don't think I'll see any significant changes in my lifetime. I don't know. But I know that if we don't do
[28:00]
as much as we can now, the next generation will find nothing to protect. I know it's depressing. I'm sorry, but that's, it is what it is.
Thinking about what human beings have done to our planet can be depressing. If you’d rather not think about it at all, you’re not alone. It takes a special kind of person to get up every morning and look these enormous problems square in the eye, with full knowledge that we might already have lost.
ANDREA: For me, fighting for nature is like fighting for my family. And when you fight for your family, you don't need hope. Right? You just fight. You don't need hope. Hope is not, you know, it's, you don't care about hope.
JEFFREY: You don't have to explain to me. I work on nuclear weapons issues. [LAUGHTER]
ANDREA: You do what you can. Exactly,
[29:00]
exactly.
JEFFREY: You know it's like, is the world gonna end? Yeah. Maybe. You know, but you…
JEFFREY: You resist it.
ANDREA: Correct. I 100 percent agree with you. Yeah. Yeah.
Jeffrey: Sometimes you fight the fight, even if you think you’re going to lose.
Andrea: Absolutely.
SFX — Waves
THEME MUSIC
Thanks for listening - I’m Jeffrey Lewis and this is The Reason We’re All Still Here.
It's executive produced by me, Andy Chugg and Whitney Donaldson. Special thanks to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
This episode was produced by Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny, and Stephen Wood. It was written by Stephen Wood and me. Story editing from Sara Joyner. Additional editing from Whitney Donaldson. Technical direction and engineering by Nick “the Wizard” Dooley. Music and sound design
[30:00]
by Andy Chugg. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Additional production support from Mark Van Hare and Gemma Castelli-Foley. Special thanks to Jessica Varnum, Christina Regasa, Megan Larson, and Maggie Taylor.
____________________________________________________________________________
[31:07]