YouSaid · the spoken record

Ian Urbina

lines on the record: 35
first: 2020-08-18
most recent: 2020-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Conservationists or the anti-trafficking workers who are in port helping to free some of these such young boys, you know, the law enforcement players who are out there trying to police to the extent that they can, and then even higher altitude to your actual question, are we tackling any of these problems on a meta level? This recent Korea story is an example of what that looks like, an optimistic outlook on, you know, an amazing firm called Global Fishing Watch teaming up with international academics and law enforcement and a journalist, in my case, to spend a year investigating this and showing the world what's happening out there in a way that hopefully moves the needle. And I think it has started to move the needle on this issue at least.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there's just to start from the ground up and move toward your question, there's beauty and heroism in sizable quantities, right, out there and plenty of examples. So just from the camaraderie to the humor, to the scrappy ingenuity, to the will to survive, to the work ethic of the very trafficked migrant Cambodian fifteen year old boys on these vessels who are there stuck and have no choice but to stay, and yet they're inspiring. And that gives you a real at least it gave me and continues to a sense of hope and wonder, frankly, at us as humans and them as pretty impressive survivors, then move up an altitude to some of these players that are out there fighting the good fight, you know, the vigilante.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Already that sort of puts you in the right headspace about these people. And then you think about the fact that the governments, because laws are only as good as their enforcement, to the extent that there are any laws that are not contradictory or murky, that apply for out there, there are very, very few police that actually can enforce them. The players out there, the nefarious players, the ones who want to murder or beat or rape or dump oil or sell arms or sell people or what have you, the really seasoned ones, which are minority, but know this, that out there the captain is God and you can do what you want because no one is really going to come after you and you only need to worry a little bit when you come into port that it might catch up to it with you. But if you spend most of your time out there, you can do as you see fit.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that if you view the 56 odd million mostly men seafarers as a tribe, almost anthropologically think of them as this diaspora, transient tribe that has its own language and norms and rules and hierarchies and worldview. And certainly mode of existence and crime, they have a lot of distinctions to them. And as a tribe, they're relatively invisible to us landlubbers who live on land, but yet rely on them hugely, ninety percent of everything we consume comes by way of ship, right? So they operate in a vitally important space that we rarely hear about, and they do stuff that's really important.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And time don't operate the same way they do on land. And so just sort of surviving that experience on the off chance that you might get to that fleet or that captain or that one vessel or that one little atoll where you're aiming and talk to the right people, that is another challenge to the journalism.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can relate to the beauty and horror of trying to capture a world that is so foreign than the one that your readers are familiar with. So, you know, it's like space travel and time travel bundled in one in that you're going back in time and you're seeing things you thought had disappeared a century ago, slavery, arms trafficking, illegal wailing, you know, piracy. These are things of lore, and yet there they were right in front of me and are in ongoing stories. And so rendering that reality in words that land in a believable consumable fashion to readers is not easy. And then space travel, you're in a spaceship, right? You are on a boat traveling through an inhospitable middle space for weeks sometimes, months, other times. The laws of physical”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, as a fellow reporter, I think you can relate and probably intuit the answers here. One is the geography. This is editors want stories fast and this is not a fast place to get to and find people to talk to. And so just the difficulty of getting out to sea and the amount of time that sea travel takes and then the conditions on the boats that are of most interest, which are typically long haul global fishing vessels, these are awfully dirty, extremely dangerous vessels. Furthermore, the culture of fishing generally is a very closed one and outsiders are viewed with a skepticism that I had never encountered before and I've covered truck drivers and coal miners. So there are a lot of barriers to access. And then when you get there, just as a fellow writer,”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the South Korean squid fishermen who have for several generations depended on the very same squid that they can no longer catch. So this is not a great situation. So when I went to Yulung Island, it was very interesting because on the in South Korea, on South Korean mainland, people were very nervous to talk about, to say anything about the Chinese or the North Koreans for reasons of the political tensions of the time. So I had to sort of warm them up quite significant to get them to talk about this problem. When I went to Yulung Island, they couldn't stop talking about it. I mean, that was the first thing they brought up and said, please will you tell the world what's happening to us and what they're doing. And here are pictures of when they come in. Here's what they did to our one main clean water pipe that runs to the island when they drop their anchor and dragged it and then just left and we were out the funds to actually get potable water and you know they just went”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emerges and the entire Chinese flotilla realizes they need to get out of the middle of the ocean of the sea and hunker down, drop anchor in safer waters near a port, the best place to go is this island. And that's terrible news for the mayor of Yulung Island because when you have 700, 800 huge industrial boats enter your waters and drop anchor in a port that's used to on a busy day twenty vessels, you have big problems and pollution problems, noise problems with the generators, just resource problems when these individuals, if they disembark and come ashore, there can be clashes and there's real tension culturally and professionally, if you will, between the South Koreans who live on this island who are being put out of business by these big industrial boats that are illegally fishing.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's this tiny spit of land in the middle of the East Sea or Sea of Japan, which is the land closest to the North Korean sea border that you can go to. It's the only place in that middle of that body border. And it's a strange place, and I desperately wanted to go visit it for that reason. It's 98% consisting of squid fishermen. It's a South Korean island. It's tiny. It's gorgeous. It's a popular spot if you can stomach the boat trip or the flight for South Korean tourists mountainous, beautiful. And it's also an island that has a tiny port, a port that happens to be closest to the fishing grounds that these very Chinese boats use or target in North Korean waters. All right, so when a major storm”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Country had to reckon for however long that panic lasted with the notion that impending destruction was on the way. It was a false report, but it felt very real at the time to Japanese. And so these are very lived worries for the Japanese and the South Koreans, especially when, quite bluntly, the US administration”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in a weird moment, aren't we? You know, with this global pandemic. And so at the time of this reporting, it was a different world. And at the time of this reporting, when we went to sea to document this story, it was only 2019, but it seems like an eternity ago in the year prior there had been serious escalation in the rhetoric between North Korea and the US and therefore between North Korea and indirectly Japan, which is a US ally, and indeed would be the first place hit if any of those recently tested nuclear weapons were launched by North Korea. And so there was acute worry in Japan. Indeed, you'll probably remember two years, two and a half years ago there was an incident where there was an alarm went off in Japan nationally that nuclear weapons were inbound and the entire”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decades ago, there were spies and were real examples, documented examples of the North Koreans attempting to infiltrate Japan and even kidnappings historically by North Koreans of Japanese coastal citizens as leverage. But those years are long since passed.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personally, I think so. I can't say with certainty, but the theories that speculate that these fishermen are serving other purposes don't add up to me because they're much easier ways if North Korea had the resources and inclination to want to send spies into Japan or South Korea for that to occur. Sending older fishermen across the sea as a ruse for entering the country seems implausible to me. And the contagion notion also just seems like a reach to me. What those theories more indicate is as you suggested, they tell you more about the historical paranoia, the historical tensions that exist between these countries. And indeed, two.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Japanese investigators, they've said they got stuck or the engine died or something like that, but they don't mention typically the Chinese. The Chinese spottings have largely and been well documented by South Korean Coast Guard, Japanese Coast Guard, who when the Chinese pass through those waters are allowed to board those vessels. And that's when interviews with those players have occurred.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very little, you know, for again, pure speculation, but lots of predictable reasons the North Korean fishermen, you know, the fishing industry generally around the world, but especially in North Korea, tends to draw on very poor, less educated rural folk. So these are very provincial North Koreans who don't speak any other language and are very fearful of saying anything to foreign authorities probably because there would be dire repercussions for their families back home if they attempted or were seen to be attempting to talk to the enemy outsiders or even try to emigrate. So they tend to clam up and just say I want to be sent back home. Please send me back home. And that's all that they say. They got stuck out sometimes in sparse interviews.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And typically the engine dies, a storm hits. These are very rough weather-wise waters, high waves, and when the boats do wash up with bodies on them in Japan, they usually look like men who were stranded for long periods of time.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starvation, hypothermia, malnutrition are the typical causes of death. Usually the speculation is that if you think of the coast of North Korea and you think of, say, a thousand nine hundred, eight hundred huge industrial Chinese votes, and the Chinese, by the way, are famously aggressive. If you get too near, if they perceive you as a competitor or a threat, there's usually security boats that go with these flotillas. So you don't want to go anywhere near them. And so these wooden boats need these North Korean wooden boats need to go around the band of Chinese boats and to the other side so as to fish safely and productively. So they're going all the way around the band of Chinese boats to the 200, 300 mile mark of their waters.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They wash ashore, right? And they're maybe 20 to 25 feet in length, barnacle crusted wooden vessels, very low tech. A lot of these boats use very bright light bulbs, which is one of the ways that Global Fishing Watch and a team of academics use satellites to spot them because the light bulbs are turned on at night and they attract the squid closer to the surface of the water, make them easier to catch. And so when they wash ashore, you know, these are vessels that are clearly very old. They're typically one or two outboard motors, the motors and how old they are and how broken down they are tell you a lot about the state of the industry in North Korea. And often they have North Korean documents on board indicating that their government has given them permission to go to sea.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fishermen, you know, the average North Korean citizens themselves and fishermen, the impact of this presence is severe. So you have number one the decline of a key source of protein and food because of the overfishing and industrialization of this take. And bear in mind, just not to go down a rabbit hole here on the fisheries science, the squid migrate up to this northernmost point in their short lifespan and they procreate at the top of their migration and then they head south back down to the lower tip of the Korean Peninsula to die. These fish are being pulled out of the water by this”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They call it the hermit kingdom for a reason, which is to say that very little information gets out from there. So you're always a little at risk when you try to talk about North Korea because you're basing the perspective on minimal info. So when it comes to the government and the sort of higher level impact of this massive incursion of the Chinese, it's hard to say whether that's hurting or helping the government. For all we can tell, the North Korean government is benefiting from this incursion because there are some underhand under the table financial deals that have been cut in violation of the sanctions that are helping keep the current North Korean government afloat. On the other hand, this might, these incursions, this squid fleet might be occurring without North Korean permission or benefit, in which case it would be quite hurting the North Koreans on the lower level of Korean society, meaning”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, threefold in the last four decades. So China is making a real push to establish its hegemony on the water. Partially, again, that's a lot of its population and its region. Asia generally eats seafood. Furthermore, there's a vacuum there that China sees the opportunity to fill.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, in fairness, I think it's always important not to sort of slip into some sort of xenophobic China bashing that's bordering on racist. If you forget the historical context, that reminds us that Europe and the US were engaged in this very same agenda for many decades and behaved in much the same way as and Russia as we grew to sort of imperial power. China is simply the new big guy on the block globally and is acting as such and it has made a very clear decision that one of the ways it's going to do that is on the water because most other countries, look in the 1980s the US for example had 400 navy vessels the US now has half that numbers whereas China's numbers of navy vessels and fishing boats have grown”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Itself. So for all of those reasons, and furthermore, China has a maritime geopolitical effort underway in which it's actively using its fishing boats as proxy forces for other ambitions, oil and gas, mining, shipping lane access, et cetera. And you see these fishing boats in many places in the world, including the South China Sea near Thailand and the Spratly Islands, playing a pseudo-military role. So for all of these reasons, no, China doesn't tend to rein in its fishing fleet. In fact, it empowers and protects the fishing fleet to do things that are illegal.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the case, and it's not really just me. China has again and again been ranked as the sort of worst purveyor of what's called IUU or a legal unregulated and unreported fishing. Partly that's complicated as to why that is the case. Factors include it has the largest fishing fleet on the planet, you know, the next closest contestant is, well, the Chinese fishing fleet is larger than the next three countries combined. So it's a sprawling force. China also has 1.3 billion population, so the sort of food security pressures internally to China are strong. And also China doesn't have a long reputation of strong oversight of its fishing industry. You know, it was sort of one of these industries that for many decades the government said, you know, could read.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Waters because they have a lot at stake and they have strong naval and coast guard presences. And so then now throw the Chinese in the mix who don't border this sea, but they cross through national waters to get to North Korean waters. And you have a volatile situation. You have some lax players, you have some very aggressive players, and you have some interlopers.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has some to do with the players at hand. So on the one hand you have North Korea and North Korea does not have the fuel or navy capacity to really monitor its waters. So there are very few Coast Guard or naval vessels that are out there monitoring those waters and enforcing the rules. And then on the other side you have Russia which has a very strong navy but doesn't tend to enforce fishing violations of this sort and certainly doesn't tend to go out to the outer edge of its territorial waters to deal with this furthermore what's being taken namely squid is not a huge commodity in Russia so they tend to historically look the other way around the other way. Now Japan and South Korea are the other players bordering this sea and those two countries very aggressively enforced”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, without a doubt, the sanctions on this matter are fairly clear and no foreign powers are allowed to be fishing in those waters.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“sanctions that forbade many things, including any foreign vessels being in North Korean waters, those sanctions were having an impact on the North Korean economy, both in terms of fuel, in terms of the ability of the country to get clean or real quantities of fuel, new engine parts, so they could repair their boats, and also just food. And so all of those forms of desperation were adding to the tendency of these fishermen to go further out to sea. And so those factors primarily contributed to the rise in number.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the cumulative effect, you know, so this is all speculation, informed speculation, but nonetheless speculation, various factors. Number one, the sort of accumulated presence of these industrial boats, which bear in mind these are five, six times larger than the North Korean artisanal boats. They're extremely efficient. And when you're talking about 800 of them, that has a real impact, especially over the course of time. So four or five years running this fleet had been coming in and raking the waters, and that was accumulating and causing a greater level of desperation from the North Korean boat fishermen to go further out to reach bare minimum quota. Secondly, the international pressure that had been applied to North Korea after the 2017 nuclear tests in the form of UN”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time were dots on a map, many of them to the tune of, you know, almost eight hundred, then the next task was to verify are these squid boats and are they all Chinese?”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Off for six, seven years time and it doesn't typically occur just by artisanal boats like the ones we've described. So there had to be a bigger factor at play. And then the other evidence of at least the presence, if not the repercussions of the Chinese flotilla, was that a sort of combination of about four different types of satellites were used that allowed this firm called Global Fishing Watch to suddenly see what previously was invisible, which is these boats in these squid boats, Chinese squid boats in North Korean waters who had their transponders turned off and were trying to be there without being seen. And once that rather clever approach was used to lay eyes on what at the time”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are two things that show Impact. One is there's been a precipitous decline in the square. in this body of water known as the Sea of Japan or by Koreans as the East Sea, and a seventy percent decline is a pretty sharp drop in”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and protein sources, and these fishermen do to that protein. Going too far out to sea getting stranded, and then due to the currents washing ashore in Japan. That was the theory at the time.”
2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2020-08-18 · Intelligence Squared · Ghost Ships and Geopolitics, with Ian Urbina and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source