MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Thursday, July 2nd 2026 - 09:55 UTC
Spain controls much of the world's Loligo squid catch, mainly through the roughly 16 licences granted by the Falklands to fish in their waters, with catches close to 50,000 tons a year
An international investigation published by the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial, with an extensive interactive report, describes how the expansion of Asian fishing fleets in international waters —mainly Chinese— has transformed the global market for frozen squid, with a direct impact on the European fleet and consequences for fishing in the South Atlantic, one of the main sources of income for the Falklands.
According to the work, the Chinese fleet's fishing effort in the Southwest Atlantic grew 85% between 2019 and 2024. Against the roughly 25 jigger vessels that, according to Galician shipowners, Spain operates in the region, between 300 and 500 foreign-flagged ships —mostly from China, South Korea and Taiwan— fish at the edge of Argentina's exclusive economic zone, in the so-called “Mile 201.” Those fleets extract on the high seas between 1.5 and 3 million tons a year of Illex argentinus, one of the species known as pota, a volume that comfortably exceeds the maximum caught within Argentine national waters even in a record season.
