 Image: Yonhap News Agency |
North Korea’s
National Defense Commission has handed down an order banning Chinese fishing boats
from employing pair trawling practices in its waters. Pair trawling, a
practice where two boats, with one towing each warp [towing cables] swiftly
through spawning aggregations of fish, is illegal in South Korea and a number
of other countries, but a pervasive practice among
these fleets pouring into North Korean waters from China.
“Earlier this month, an order came down
from the National Defense Commission calling for strict crackdowns on illegal
fishing boats in the East and West Sea,” a source from
Gangwon Province told Daily NK on Thursday. “It
announced that stringent measures would be enforced against pair trawling boats
from China, fishing for squid in the East Sea and blue crab in the
West Sea.”
“The document also contained a statement
saying this move reflects the Marshal’s [Kim Jong Eun] great willingness to make an abundance of fish available to the people,” the source said. “It includes a complete
ban on Chinese fishing vessels entering the East Sea from a trade company run
by Jang Keum Chun, which has been going on for over a decade.”
Jang Keum Chun is the grandson of Chinese
independence activist Jang Wool Hwa, who sided with Kim Il Sung during the
fight for liberation from Japanese rule in the early 1930s. Records of the
older Jang are left in Kim Il Sung’s memoir, With the Century. This unique relationship
is said to have prompted Kim Jong Il to grant the grandson fishing rights in
the East Sea, a practice that continues to this day.
“On Kim Jong Il’s
orders, the North gave Jang Keum Chun’s company the
rights to fish for squid in the East Sea at the turn of the century, and this
has brought in some 100 Chinese pair trawling boats each year,” the source said. “Because of this, the
catch for our fishermen continually dropped each year, and in some severe
cases, people took their own lives because they couldn’t
make ends meet.”
Noting that an official letter would have sufficed to inform the company of the new order, the source explained that the
announcing the decision through the National Defence Commission was simply to
promulgate Kim Jong Eun’s “love
of his people.”
Although the fishing vessels from China may
have contributed to overall problems, they only exacerbated the root of the cause:
ill-devised policies by the state that dealt a huge blow to people’s livelihoods. “The fault all falls on the
state for giving China fishing rights to begin with, but they’re trying to blame the foreign fishing vessels for everything,” he concluded.
