It’s the classic postcard image of Ghana: brightly colored, narrow wooden fishing boats pulling into the dock of seaside village, bringing in the daily catch. But increasingly this way of life is under threat, with a new investigation showing how Chinese vessels engaged in illegal fishing are depleting stocks, sometimes even selling the fish back to the local communities whose livelihoods and food security have been undermined.

China is the world’s biggest fish producer and has the largest distant-water fleet (CDWF) — officially 2,701 vessels but likely thousands more — many of which engage in high instances of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, according to an NGO, the Environmental Justice Foundation.

The group’s report this week found that some 90% of Ghana’s industrial trawl fleet is actually owned by Chinese corporations using local “front” companies to register as Ghanaian and get around the law.

“EJF has identified continuous instances of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and human rights abuses associated with the CDWF in West Africa, especially Ghana, where Chinese companies use elaborate schemes to hide the ultimate beneficial ownership of their so-called Ghanaian domestic vessels. These schemes include joint ventures, shell companies and subsidiaries,” it said.

While the CDWF also operates in waters off Asia and elsewhere, its activities in Africa account for 78.5% of its approved offshore fishery projects, EJF found when analyzing data from the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

CDWF bottom-trawlers catch an estimated 2.35 million tons of fish a year in West Africa, accounting for 50% of China’s total distant water catch and worth some $5 billion.

China’s gain is often to the detriment of countries like Ghana, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, EJF says, with the highest number of illegal fishing incidents reported in the West African region between 2015 and 2019.

“Illegal fishing and overcapacity in the Ghanaian trawl sector is having catastrophic impacts on coastal communities across the country,” EJF’s Chief Operating Officer Max Schmid told VOA by phone, with some 80-90 percent of local fishers in Ghana reporting a decline in income over the last five years.

Women — who are usually responsible for processing and selling the local catch — are often hit hardest by the loss of income, turning to transactional sex, according to EJF, a phenomenon locally dubbed “fish for sex.”

Meanwhile, locals working on the Chinese trawlers often experience human rights abuses, with ten Ghanaians interviewed by EJF saying that they had all “experienced or witnessed physical abuse by Chinese captains.”

It’s also becoming more and more common for the Chinese vessels to catch small pelagic fish, which are the main population caught by small-scale fishers, and then sell them back to communities for profit, the organization found.

In Ghana, neither the Navy nor the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development responded to emailed request for comment.

The Chinese Embassy in Accra did not answer phone calls from VOA or respond to emailed requests for comment.

However, China has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, with one article in the state-affiliated Global Times newspaper last year “refuting Western media rumors of “China’s illegal fishing” and saying Beijing had introduced moratoriums on squid fishing and had in fact, “tightened its oversight of deep-sea fishing vessels in recent years.”

Another piece in the paper said “the country has done more than any other to protect the sea’s environment and resources.” Separately, China’s state news agency Xinhua has pointed to Chinese-funded developments, such as a new fishing port complex in Ghanaian capital Accra, saying it will “greatly improve the working and living conditions for local fishermen.”
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Банк дозволяє громадянам РФ дистанційно оформлювати віртуальні картки міжнародних платіжних систем Visa/Mastercard
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Терміни надання такого доступу українцям поки невідомі
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Вирішується питання про конфіскацію арештованих вагонів у дохід держави
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International efforts to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine are being felt far from Europe, in the U.S. Gulf state of Louisiana, a hub of America’s energy sector.

Late last month, the European Union announced it was exploring ways to gain independence from Russian energy “well before 2030.” American firms took note.

“You can see most European countries don’t want to be seen as complicit with the barbarism of Russia,” said Brian Lloyd, vice president for communications at Sempra Energy, a U.S.-based energy infrastructure company with investments in natural gas production. “Many see every dollar sent to Russia’s state-owned energy companies as helping to fuel its aggression in Ukraine, so Europe is seeking energy alternatives.”

In late March, the U.S. announced a deal with the EU to begin replacing some of the natural gas Russia had been supplying. By the end of this year, President Joe Biden said, the United States would be able to ship enough gas to Europe to offset at least 10% of what Russia currently provides, or 15 billion cubic meters of liquefied natural gas.

LNG is natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state. Its volume is approximately 600 times smaller than its gaseous state.

“This makes shipping to Europe economical when building pipelines across an ocean wouldn’t be,” explained Eric Smith, associate director of Tulane University’s Energy Institute in New Orleans.  

 The U.S. plans to meet its new commitments to Europe by increasing domestic production of natural gas. To do so, industry leaders propose building new LNG facilities and expanding and increasing the efficiency of existing ones.

“It will be like the Marshall Plan we supported Europe with after World War II, but this one will have an energy focus,” Lloyd said. “The United States is uniquely positioned to lead the way on this because we have some of the least expensive natural gas in the world.”

Much of the existing and increased LNG production capacity is centered in the states of Louisiana and Texas, along the energy-rich Gulf of Mexico. Many state and industry leaders welcome the production of LNG in the region, while environmentalists and commercial fishers are far less enthusiastic.

“We make our living in the sea,” said Dean Blanchard, a shrimper and the president of Dean Blanchard Seafood. “I don’t know much about natural gas yet, but anything that alters the dynamics of the water really screws us.”

Energy crisis abroad

Approximately 40% of the natural gas used in Europe — as well as 25% of crude oil and refined petroleum products — is produced in Russia.

“Europe is a continent that has been dependent on Russian energy for quite some time,” Smith told VOA. “So Biden’s commitment to help supply the EU with LNG became a key component in convincing some European countries to announce sanctions against Moscow. That’s why this increased production of LNG is so important.”

But Europe’s energy crisis began long before Russian’s invasion of Ukraine. Consecutive colder-than-usual winters and a world awakening from coronavirus lockdowns boosted demand for many types of energy.

Europe has moved aggressively to embrace renewable energy sources but found production to be inconsistent because it often depends on the weather.

“Europe is caught in a tough spot — they don’t want to be importing fossil fuels like natural gas as they try to reduce carbon emissions,” Smith said. “But natural gas actually makes for a perfect transition. Nuclear and coal plants take weeks to turn on and off, whereas natural gas can be switched off in minutes. When you’re low on renewables, natural gas can be an easy bridge to get you through another cold winter.”

Smith added, “It’s also, by the way, needed for fertilizer and to produce grain, which might be very important for Europe and the Middle East should this war in Ukraine continue.”

Environmental crisis at home

Much of the LNG exported by the United States will be funneled through the U.S. Gulf Coast.

“We have six or seven LNG export terminals in the United States,” explained Naomi Yoder, staff scientist at Healthy Gulf, an environmental organization focused on protecting the Gulf of Mexico. “Four of those — soon to be five — are located on the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas. We have six more that are in the works in the region as well. That’s a massive number for one relatively limited region.”

And it’s a region that is no stranger to energy-related environmental disasters.

“It would take me hours to tell you about the effects of that one BP oil spill from 2010,” seafood entrepreneur Blanchard said. “Our ecosystem is still recovering from that spill — the amount of fish and shrimp and oysters are still down. And the number of humans that got sick down here in Grand Isle (small Louisiana barrier island), those people will never recover.”

Blanchard said the BP oil spill got attention only because of its magnitude. But smaller spills, he said, happen every day.

“These energy companies say they care about us and our livelihood, but they’re destroying us,” he said.

Blanchard’s hometown of Grand Isle could soon gain an LNG facility nearby. While Blanchard admits he’s unsure precisely how expanding the production and transportation of natural gas will affect the ecosystem, Yoder predicts only bad results.

“We’ve seen it many times,” Yoder said. “The production of natural gas produces air pollution through methane leaks and water pollution, too. It harms the ecosystem locally as well as the environment more generally. People like to say natural gas emits less carbon than coal, but the process of building these facilities, and liquifying that gas, and shipping it across the ocean just to turn it back into gas — that all emits a lot of carbon into the air, too. We don’t need to produce more energy from fossil fuels. We need to transition to renewables like solar, wind and water energies.”

Balancing act

Advocates of natural gas don’t oppose renewable energy, said Sempra Energy’s Lloyd. Rather, he sees them as complementing each other.

“I think we all have the same goal,” he said. “We want to see an increase in the use of renewable energy over time. But you can’t pretend like if we don’t produce this natural gas now, that Europe won’t just get it from somewhere else. They’ll probably get it from Russia, where the methane leaks are far more numerous and where they aren’t working nearly as hard as we are to further curb carbon emissions.”

Tulane University’s Smith agrees.

“Every serious analyst says we aren’t able to shift our world economy away from fossil fuels between now and 2050,” he said. “So Europe is going to get their natural gas one way or another because they’re not going to just let their people freeze or starve.”

For now, many energy industry leaders and lawmakers say, an opportunity exists to curtail a source of revenue to Russia’s war machine — and to boost jobs and revenues along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

But fishermen like Blanchard fret about a potentially costly trade-off.

“Of course I want to help Ukraine, and I’m proud of the way they’re fighting for themselves,” he said. “But how can I be expected to support something that could destroy my livelihood? I can’t do that for Ukraine or anyone else.”
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The United States is trying to be strategic about how it “realigns” its trade relationship with China, but is not interested in a large-scale “decoupling” or a trade “divorce,” U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in an interview this week.

Tai made the remarks in Singapore, where she had traveled to discuss the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. The purpose of the framework, she said, “is to allow for the United States and our most like-minded partners in this region to be able to collaborate on key economic issues and emerging global challenges. And those include working together to promote resilience and sustainability for our own economies, and also through partnership with each other’s economies.”

Tai made her comments in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

New approach

Tai’s trip to Singapore came just days after she told Congress, in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, that it is time for the United States to reassess how it deals with China as a trading partner.

Measures undertaken in the past, including the regime of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, have failed to get China to open its markets to U.S. goods and to avoid anti-competitive behavior, she told lawmakers.

In the interview Tuesday, Tai said the United States may need to use “other tools” in order to adjust its relationship with China.

Pressed on what those other tools might look like, she said, “I think that it’s less about what more we can do to China. I think it is more about how we can shape the U.S.-China trade relationship and again, to realign it to create incentives for our economic actors to ensure that this relationship is one that feels balanced, that is fair, and also, importantly, that is contributing to a sense of security and resilience for not just our economies, but for the global economy.”

Recognizing reality

Tai’s explicit ruling out of a trade divorce between the U.S. and China may reflect the simple reality on the ground in the Indo-Pacific region, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“All these countries have more trade with China than they have with the U.S.,” he told VOA. “And further, the trade with China is growing faster than with the U.S. So, they don’t have any real commercial interest in any kind of decoupling or divorce.”

Leaders in the region have repeatedly expressed concern about being put in a position in which they are forced to choose between partnering with the U.S. and partnering with China. Their concern has been sharpened by rhetoric coming from U.S. lawmakers, some of whom have pressed for trade arrangements that isolate China.

“That notion faded in her rhetoric,” Hufbauer said, placing Tai and the Biden administration closer to what he called the “realist camp.”

“Trade flows, the magnitude of them, and also now, investment flows — they do not favor a division into two camps,” he said. “Because too many countries have very strong interests in maintaining good commercial relations and good diplomatic relations with both China and the U.S.”

End to tariffs

“It’s encouraging that a senior member of the administration is stating that economic decoupling is not a goal of the administration,” Doug Barry, a senior director at the U.S.-China Business Council, told VOA in an email exchange.

“Whatever Ambassador Tai has in mind in terms of a new trade policy toward China must include preserving and increasing the benefits of the current relationship,” Barry said. “This would include ditching the Trump-era tariffs, which have not changed China’s behavior and have instead hurt American workers, farmers and families.”

Barry said his organization would like to see more high-level trade discussion between U.S. and Chinese leaders, but said, “due to internal politics in both countries, such talks seem unrealistic until late this year at the earliest.”

Reestablishing a U.S. presence

Tai’s trip to Singapore is, in part, an effort to reestablish a U.S. presence in the region on trade issues.

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive regional trade agreement that had taken years to negotiate. The agreement was resurrected without U.S. participation as the 11-country Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPATPP), one of the largest free trade organizations in the world.

Some of the CPATPP participants have expressed hope that the U.S. would rejoin the trade bloc, but the Biden administration has said it will not, preferring to work within the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. China has said it would be interested in joining CPATPP. However, existing members, including Japan and Australia, have said they believe Beijing’s extensive interference in free markets disqualifies China from membership.

Singapore as key partner

Experts say Tai’s trip to Singapore highlighted the role the city-state might play in the Biden administration’s proposed future.

“Singapore is a natural Southeast Asian partner for developing an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework,” Brian Harding, a senior expert on Southeast Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told VOA.

“Singapore welcomes Chinese economic activity in Southeast Asia but is clear-eyed about China’s strategic intentions,” Harding said. “While Singapore can be a staunch defender of the United States’ importance to regional stability, it is also concerned that U.S.-China competition can be destabilizing in and of itself.”

VOA Mandarin Service reporter Jessie Jiang contributed to this story.
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«Фактично імпортні та експортні операції з державою-агресором повністю зупинилися з початком війни»
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After a sharp plunge in value at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the Russian ruble has recovered much of its value against other world currencies, a change made possible by aggressive capital controls put in place by the government in Moscow and a continual stream of payments for the country’s oil and gas exports.

The ruble’s resilience in the face of sanctions may make it easier, at least temporarily, for the regime of President Vladimir Putin to claim a measure of victory over international efforts to turn his government into a pariah. However, the practical effects of the ruble’s recovery may be limited for ordinary Russians, who remain largely cut off from global markets.

Also, as evidence of Russian troops’ brutal treatment of Ukrainian civilians accumulates, and Western governments take further steps to wean themselves off Russian energy, the Kremlin’s ability to protect its currency may weaken.

“I think the natural next step and a big set of questions is around energy revenues,” Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told VOA.

She added, “As the images of atrocities on the ground continue, the pressure to do more is going to increase.”

Surprising recovery

One week before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, the ruble was worth about 1.3 cents in U.S. currency, meaning that it cost a little over 76 rubles to buy one dollar. By March 7, after governments around the world announced a range of painful sanctions on the Russian economy, the value of the ruble had fallen by nearly half. That day, a ruble was worth 0.7 cent, meaning that it cost almost 143 rubles to buy one dollar.

The expectation among many in the early days of the war was that the ruble’s loss of value was going to be a long-term problem for the Russian economy. Crucially, most of the Russian central bank’s foreign reserves — funds denominated in foreign currencies and held at banks outside Russia — were frozen. This left Moscow without the option of driving up the price of the ruble by buying it on the open market with dollars, euros and other foreign currencies.

In fact, the Russian government and its central bank took several steps that drove up the price of its currency. As of Tuesday, the ruble was worth approximately 1.2 cents, meaning that it now costs about 84 rubles to buy a dollar — a far cry from the 143 rubles required just a month previously.

“The Russian central bank more than doubled domestic interest rates to 20%. And they also put in place capital controls — that is, they limited the ability of Russian individuals to buy foreign exchange,” Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, former deputy director of the research department of the International Monetary Fund, told VOA.

Milesi-Ferretti, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, said another key factor in restoring the ruble’s value has been a new restriction on Russian exporters. 

All Russian businesses still able to sell goods internationally are required to take foreign currency earned from those sales and transfer it to the Russian central bank in exchange for rubles.

This creates a steady demand for rubles, keeping the price high, and gives the Russian central bank a new source of foreign currency.

Dubious future

But the price of the Russian ruble in currency markets does not tell the full story of the impact sanctions have had on the Russian economy in general, and on the lives of ordinary Russians in particular.

“Russia’s economy, by virtue of the sanctions and the coping mechanisms the central bank has employed, has become much more an internal economy, a smaller economy,” Ziemba, of the Center for a New American Security, told VOA.

“It’s important to remember that Russians who used to be able to use their credit cards to purchase goods abroad in the U.S. and Europe, can’t,” she said.

This is in part because banking restrictions have made it impossible for most Russian banks to hold correspondent accounts in banks outside the country, which facilitate international payments. Also, inside Russia, major payment systems such as Visa and Mastercard have stopped processing cross-border transactions.

“So, there is difficulty in actually buying goods, both from a financial perspective, but also because a lot of companies have basically said — even if the trade is legal — they don’t want to do transactions with Russia,” Ziemba added. “The ability to actually use these assets is significantly limited.”

Energy wild card

One thing that remains uncertain is the extent to which Western governments, particularly in Europe, will be willing to stop purchasing oil and gas from Russia. Currently, Russia is running a large current account surplus, meaning it is exporting far more than it is importing.

In recent days, European leaders have proposed a ban on Russian coal imports and have floated the possibility of sanctions on Russian oil as well. Russian natural gas, which makes up a large percentage of the fuels used across Europe, does not appear to be on the chopping block.

Major action against Russian energy exports could significantly damage the Russian economy, but it is unclear that Western governments are prepared to take that step.

“We’re going to have to see how the war evolves, how expectations evolve,” Milesi-Ferretti said. “Everything is shrouded in uncertainty.”
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465 підприємств вже знайшли обладнані площі для своїх потужностей
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