Every year a Chinese-dominated flotilla big enough to be seen from space pillages the rich marine life on Mile 201, a largely ungoverned part of the South Atlantic off Argentina
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n a monitoring room in Buenos Aires, a dozen members of the Argentinian coast guard watch giant industrial-fishing ships moving in real time across a set of screens. “Every year, for five or six months, the foreign fleet comes from across the Indian Ocean, from Asian countries, and from the North Atlantic,” says Cdr Mauricio López, of the monitoring department. “It’s creating a serious environmental problem.”
Just beyond Argentina’s maritime frontier, hundreds of foreign vessels – known as the distant-water fishing fleet – are descending on Mile 201, a largely ungoverned strip of the high seas in the South Atlantic, to plunder its rich marine life. The fleet regularly becomes so big it can be seen from space, looking like a city floating on the sea.
The charity Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has described it as one of the largest unregulated squid fisheries in the world, warning that the scale of activities could destabilise an entire ecosystem.
