"Some 80% of the catch is sent without passing customs control to neighboring states," Yury Gulyagin said.
He said the Criminal Code needed to be changed to strengthen responsibility for ecological crimes, adding that according to estimates, in 2006, 80 fishing vessels made illegal catches worth over 900 million rubles ($36 million).
And in the last two years a total of 7 million tons of seafood worth 230 million rubles ($9.2 million) have been seized in the Bering and Okhotsk Seas, Gulyagin said.
In July the Russian coast guard detained two North Korean commercial vessels for violating Russian territorial waters and poaching, and a border service spokesperson said at the time: "Since the start of the year over 80 border incidents have been recorded involving commercial fishing vessels from North Korea whose sole reason for being in Russian territorial waters was commercial fishing."
A court in Russia's Far East fined a Japanese captain of a trawler 300,000 rubles ($11,700) for poaching in September 2007, and in August 2006 a crew member on a Japanese ship was shot dead by Russian coast guards near the Kuril Islands off Russia's Pacific Coast.
In addition, several Cambodian vessels have been detained in the Sea of Okhotsk. In January some 25 metric tons of crab were discovered by Russian coast guards, and in April, 13 metric tons of crab were found on board another Cambodian fishing vessel.
