Mile 201: The invisible line where fishing becomes environmental poaching

You only have to glance a few seconds at any nocturnal satellite image over the Argentine Sea to understand the grave ecological damage which has been sustained and aggravated over the years. Attention is grasped by a rosario of lights as intense as a small city whose reflectors "float" precisely at the outer limits of the continental platform.

Neither an optical illusion nor fake news from the social networks: hundreds and hundreds of trawlers with improbable flags are marauding at low speed in a zone 370 kilometres off the Patagonian coast. Precisely there at the 200th mile Argentine law ceases to reign and the survival of the fittest for the fisheries begins.

That fringe, baptised by vox populi as "Mile 201," marks the outer limit of Argentina’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) which extends 200 nautical miles beyond the coast. Until that "frontier" the country maintains exclusive rights over the exploration and exploitation of its fish resources. But one step beyond and the "high seas" begin, governed by the principle of free navigation and open fishing.

Various private studies estimate that illegal fishing causes Argentina losses of between US$600 million and one billion annually.

That is where every year in "high season," according to the reports of government offices, the Coast Guard and NGOs protecting the fisheries like Fulasp (Fundación Latinoamericana de Sostenibilidad Pesquera) a fleet ranging between 400 and 600 trawlers concentrate, mostly flying the Chinese flag but also Koreans, Taiwanese, Spaniards and a multitude of tiny countries who "sell" their colours to the highest bidder.

One of the most worrying data about this phenomenon provided by Fulasp is that between them, all these vessels annually extract between 1.5 and three million tons while the entire Argentine fishing industry only manages to unload 750-900,000 tons a year – i.e. they fish up to fourfold more. 

"The real problem is not just that they take more volume away than the Argentine fisheries. The most serious damage is biological – many species are being caught before completing their natural cycle," warns Raúl Cereseto, the president of Fulasp.

The test case is the Argentine Illex squid, argentinus, which lives for only one or two years and is also the key food of hake and many maritime birds and mammals, According to Cereseto, the combination of overfishing –to which should be added the environmental changes driven by global warming- could lead, in the short term, "not only to economic losses but also to the exhaustion of these fundamental resources."

Coast Guard Sergio Almada, the co-ordinator of Eicemar (Equipo Interdisciplinario para el Control del Tráfico Marítimo), explains one important legal aspect: his force prefers not to talk of "illegality" regarding what happens at the 201st mile because these are the high seas, governed by internationally recognised rights of free navigation and open fisheries. 

"The illegality," he explains, "only crops up when a boat crosses without permission into the Argentine EEZ " when they are pursued by the Coast Guard and the Navy.

The specialist in maritime conservation Milko Schvartzman, of the Círculo de Políticas Ambientales, sums up the ecological diagnosis: "The environmental damage does not distinguish miles. What happens at the 201st mile impacts the Argentine Sea. Judicially speaking, it cannot be called illegal there but in environmental terms it is highly destructive fishing."

To that diagnosis should be added a study of the NGO Greenpeace underlining the ecological role of the squid in its double capacity of predator and prey as the species underpinning the entire South Atlantic food chain and even performing broader oceanic functions such as transporting carbon and nutrients among different ecosystems. Its possible collapse would therefore hit not only commercial fishing but also the entire balance of the sea.

A senior official of INIDEP (Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Pesquero), Otto Wöhler, sums up a little-known technical aspect – the dragnets of the fleets pursuing banks of hake, cod or squid also affect other species which were not the fishing objective.

Andrés Nápoli, the executive director of FARN (Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales) environmental foundation adds another piece to the jigsaw puzzle – much of that fleet is concentrated in the Blue Hole, a fringe of international waters with extremely high biodiversity at the edge of the Argentine continental platform with a confluence of cold and warm currents attracting phytoplankton and zooplankton, and with them birds, maritime mammals and fish. For Nápoli, the only structural way out of this ecological damage is to follow and improve the international instruments such as the United Nations High Seas Treaty permitting the creation of protected maritime areas outside national jurisdictions, something which no country can guarantee on its own.

While the viral postcards of the 201st mile show that "floating city" formed by the squid jiggers in the Patagonian night, another environmental risk grows in the shadows. The foreign trawlers, unlike the squid jiggers, operate 365 days a year. These trawlers have passed, according to Coast Guard surveys, from 86 in 2020 to 146 this year, a 70 percent surge in barely half a decade.

Not a minor difference. The Illex squid caught by the national plan is subject to an INIDEP plan based on scientific evidence. The trawlers, in contrast, fish unregulated in the high seas and with nets which are not selective – apart from squid, they take hake and cod, two transzone resources with the highest value for Argentina.

The most serious impact, nevertheless, occurs at the bottom of the sea – dragging their nets across the sea bed, these ships incidentally catch  sedentary species, threatening other vulnerable maritime ecosystems of the extended continental platform. In various samples abundant residues of different kinds of fish are found.