"In Iran, Chinese trawlers are damaging marine ecosystems and the livelihood of local fishermen", 29 July 2020.

Iranian fishermen operating in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea have seen their business take a massive hit with the arrival of Chinese trawlers. The France 24 Observers team has been able to locate these trawlers in Iranian waters, even though some local authorities insist that they aren’t operating there. Our team also spoke to numerous fishermen about the environmental and economic impact of these boats that often use illegal methods...Khorshid...lives and works in Jask..."We started to notice them about five years ago. They started arriving little by little, and now there are more and more of them. We complained to local fishing organizations, who maintained that Chinese trawlers were only operating in international waters...Recently, the fishing organization told us that these trawlers only had the authorization to fish lanternfish [Editor’s note: Iranian fishermen don’t fish the lanternfish living in Iran’s coastal waters because Iranians don’t eat them for cultural and sometimes religious reasons]. However, we noticed that the Chinese trawlers scoop up whatever they can in their nets and not just lanternfish."...

Small scale fishermen aren’t the only victims of this intensive, industrial-scale fishing in the Persian Gulf. Farzad...is an expert in marine life in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea: "What’s happening in this region is no less than the destruction of marine life. These trawlers use a technique called bottom trawling, which means they scrape the sea floor. Everything that they destroy on the sea floor then rises to the surface. This method of fishing is illegal in almost every country."...