Is China secretly hoarding the world's fish? 

Posted By Elizabeth F. Ralph -Thursday, April 4, 2013 - 12:40 PM

 

It looks like rare earth elements aren't the only commodity China has been allegedly keeping to itself. According to a recent study published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, the Chinese have been drastically underreporting the number of fish that Chinese ships catch in other countries' waters every year.

While China tells the UNFAO, the U.N. agency that tracks global fishing data, that Chinese distant-water fishing vessels take in roughly 368,000 tons of fish a year, the Fish and Fisheries report estimates that the actual weight of the collective catch is more than 12 times that number -- around 4.6 million tons a year. At the same time, China exaggerates its domestic catch.

The report claims that the majority of the haul (64 percent) comes from off the coast of West Africa, where Chinese fishing practices could have a serious impact on the local population. "The study shows the extent of the looting of Africa, where so many people depend on seafood for basic protein," Daniel Pauly, a professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the authors of the study, told the Guardian. "We need to know how many fish have been taken from the ocean in order to figure out what we can catch in the future. Countries need to realize the importance of accurately recording and reporting their catches and step up to the plate, or there will be no fish left for our children."

It's important to note that just because the fishing goes unreported doesn't mean it's illegal. The Chinese government may have negotiated special (and usually secret) agreements with certain African coastal states allowing Chinese vessels to fish in the waters.

It's also true that the Chinese are not alone in exploiting West Africa's abundant fishing grounds. But, if these estimates are correct, Chinese fishermen are doing it on a much larger scale than anyone else, catching as much as 22 West African coastal countries and the other 38 countries fishing in the region combined. The long-term consequences for food security could be quite severe. 

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/04/04/is_china_secretly_hoarding_the_worlds_fish

 

interview

China’s fishing numbers don’t add up, UBC researcher says

MARK HUME

VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Apr. 04 2013, 8:45 PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Apr. 04 2013, 8:46 PM EDT

With a fleet of more than 3,000 vessels roaming the world’s oceans, China has long played a significant role in global fisheries.

But the impact of that wasn’t known until Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre used a statistical technique known as the Monte Carlo method to determine unreported catch data.

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  In a recently published paper, Dr. Pauly says China’s annual catch in the waters of other countries is 4.6 million metric tonnes a year – not the 368,000 tonnes officially reported to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
  The size of the unreported catch is massive, especially off the coast of West Africa, he said, and it shows the world’s oceans are being depleted of stocks much faster than was thought.
  A spokesman for the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which gathers and reports international fishing catch statistics, has criticized the study, saying the numbers for China’s catch in West Africa are far too high, nearly equal to what local African fleets take. But Dr. Pauly says the numbers reflect a grim reality: that China is out-competing local fishermen in their own waters, driving many of them into poverty.
  Dr. Pauly said China’s distant-waters fleet is fishing everywhere in the world’s oceans, except the Caribbean and North Atlantic. (The fleet’s impact in the western North Pacific wasn’t included in the study’s final analysis because that area overlaps with China’s domestic fishery and regulated fisheries off the coasts of Korea and Japan.)
  You couldn’t rely on going to official catch reports to determine China’s take, so you had to do some detective work here.
  That’s precisely the problem. China has no statistics that make any kind of sense.
  If you cannot rely on Chinese statistics, then what do you have to do? The [first question you have to answer] is: does China show up in a certain country? So we assembled [information] from websites, from newspapers, from about 500 sources and we documented the presence of China in over 80 countries.
  The second step is more tricky. We assembled a group of experts; for each country a panel of at least 10 people, and each person estimated how many boats were involved, and these estimates by the experts were all kept and averaged.
  Then for step three, for each of these boats, trollers, purse seiners and so on, we estimated catch by vessel type. We do that for every country and we add it up. Then we repeat the operation 10,000 times, picking at random from the distribution around the number, the estimated number of boats by country, and the estimated catch by boat type. And we get 10,000 solutions and we distribute the solutions, we group them in classes and we see that we get a more or less normal distribution. That is the Monte Carlo method, which tells us over all countries, [China caught] 4.6 million tonnes.
  How reliable is that approach?
  The first that used this method is [Sir Francis] Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, who asked 20 people to guess the weight of a side of beef. One person couldn’t do it, but the average of 20 was dead on. This was published in Nature. It was called Vox Populi, the voice of the people, and since then, this has been repeated in many cases and has become a formal method that is used when you have very uncertain underlying data.
  And because of this approach, for the first time, we have reliable data on the Chinese catch?
  That’s right. We know that the data from China are very precise but they are hopelessly inaccurate. Our method is very imprecise – but it probably is more accurate.
  Why is it important to have this kind of information?
  The basic way we interact with the sea is by taking fish out. So the impact of fishing cannot be assessed anywhere if we don’t know the catch, and if you cannot assess it, you can’t manage the fishery.
  In West Africa, it’s basically a free-for-all … and the local fishery operates without control, because, psychologically, the countries cannot regulate their own local fishery with a foreigner rampaging in the coast lines.
  We know now because of your research that there is massive under-reporting by China. Is there also massive overfishing?
  We think there is. All people who do stock assessment in West Africa suggest that West Africa is massively over-fished as a whole. Massively over-fished. So there is little doubt that there is a problem. And in fact, the local fisheries … are the ones who don’t catch anything any more. Some people say there is a direct relationship between that and the impoverishment of West African fishermen, and the stream of migrants to Europe. And that’s the real cost of this over-fishing in West Africa. And China adds to this.
  Does it also explain why the world’s oceans are being depleted?
  Yes, because we have fishing everywhere, and all countries with distant-water fleets under-report their impact.
  What can be done about it?
  China must be made to play by the rules, and that implies transparency, it implies reporting decent catch figures and it means not forcing the FAO, of which they are a very influential member, to publish ludicrous statistics, which is what they do. They send them rubbish and the FAO has no choice but to publish them … You know, this is absurd stuff.
  This interview has been edited and condensed.
  
  
  
  
  
   China’s global fishing 
  
  
  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/chinas-fishing-numbers-dont-add-up-ubc-researcher-says/article10792726/