South China sea: Indonesia Has Blown Up 363 Chinese Fishing vessels! Indonesia, one of the world’s leading producers of tuna, decided several years ago it had had enough of illegal foreign fishing boats entering its exclusive economic zone and taking an average of $4 billion a year in fisheries profits. In 2014 the Southeast Asian nation—a vast archipelago of more than 13,000 islands—imposed a one-year moratorium on fishing vessels built abroad, in order to evaluate their impact. During the moratorium officials discovered boats disguising foreign ownership under local names, falsifying Indonesian fishing permits or using the same permit for multiple boats. This evidence augmented other reports of foreign vessels underreporting the sizes of their boats, avoiding taxes and intruding in waters reserved for local small-scale fishers. To address the problem, Indonesia created a task force consisting of the country’s navy, marine police, coast guard and attorney general’s office. Task force members started out by aggressively capturing illegal foreign boats and deporting their crews. Then, to drive the point home, they cut, torched or dynamited holes in bottoms of the boats—sending hundreds of vessels to the seafloor to join the fishes they had sought. According to Mas Achmad Santosa, special advisor to the Indonesia Presidential Task Force to Combatting Illegal Fishing, “We sank 363 illegal fishing vessels to send a signal of strong enforcement and to create a deterrent effect.” This immediately drew international media attention, and Indonesian minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti traveled the world and appeared in YouTube videos defending her country’s aggressive strategy. To determine if Indonesia’s enforcement efforts had worked, Cabral's recent study looked at the skipjack tuna fishery—the largest in Indonesia. These fishers work at night using special lights to lure their catch, and researchers analyzed data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite to identify their boats. Team members correlated this information with automatic identification system (AIS) data (processed via an online monitoring project called Global Fishing Watch) from onboard signals that identify and track positions of ships at sea to avoid collisions. The team also examined boat identification data from the country's vessel monitoring system (VMS), which licensed boats are required to use in Indonesian waters. Models were then used to project future growth. The results showed the total of all commercial fishing in Indonesia—legal and illegal—shrunk by 25 percent after the country started sinking boats. ** China ** ** South china sea** *** South china sea news, *** South china sea dispute, *** South china sea conflict, *** South china sea latest news, *** South china sea today, *** South china sea tension, *** US navy in south china sea, *** South china, *** US military, *** US warship in south china sea, *** The south china sea, *** South china sea islands, *** China sea, *** US vs china, *** China vs taiwan, *** China military, *** South china sea 2020, *** China navy, *** US sends drone, *** us navy, *** Taiwan, *** warship in south china sea, ***South china, *** China military, *** South china sea news today, *** Beijing, *** US deploys thousands, *** US help Taiwan, *** Military