How China’s Expanding Fishing Fleet Is Depleting the World’s Oceans
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
“The Chinese government says its distant-water fishing fleet, or those vessels that travel far from China’s coast, numbers roughly 2,600, but other research, such as this study by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), puts this number closer to 17,000”.
Several paragraphs later:
“More recently, the Chinese government has stopped calling for an expansion of its distant-water fishing fleet and released a five-year plan in 2017 that restricts the total number of offshore fishing vessels to under 3,000 by 2021.“
Why would you need to announce a plan to reduce your fleet to below 3,000 if it’s only “officially“ at 2,700? Is this a case of inconsistent propaganda?
If you're that itchy for a quarrel, just have at it.
Cities, provinces, and the central government all have their own agendas and different reasons to lie. They don't necessarily do cross checks before publishing their own data.
here are 1/10 of the Chinese fishing fleet - 1/10! just outside of the Galapagos Islands. the Chinese say they have 2,600 vessels - weird how exactly 260 of those are just off the coast of a UNESCO World Heritage site fishing illegally. yes, the boatrs in international waters, but their fishing lines aren't.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariellasimke/2020/08/09/over-20...
it's not "inconsistent propaganda" it's under-reporting and outright lying, which is par for the course when it comes to the CCP.
In China, as near as I can tell, 2-3 generations have been raised with the understanding that truth is always subordinate to the goals of the CCP. In fact, if not in abstract.
That's one thing, internal to a country. That's very different when you're talking international diplomacy.
And yet it seems like China follows this exact playbook in that arena too.
It has to make for some awkward conversations when a diplomat is swearing (and believing, inasmuch as doublethink is possible) that the fleet numbers X, when another country is providing literal evidence that it's 5X.
Furthermore, it says restrict to under 3000, while you have changed it to reduce.
http://jiuban.moa.gov.cn/zwllm/ghjh/201712/t20171221_5985078...
Also for more details about the ODI estimate: https://www.cffacape.org/publications-blog/how-large-is-the-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-shanghai-population...
According to your logic, they are lying about the population size of Shanghai as well? LOL
That's the thing about lies.
At first glance is the perfect solution, you simply lie and the problem goes away.
The tricky part is when the lies start you add up and you need to keep track of it, and/or when the lie is easily observable.
I think this is a bit of both: they don't even know what they are keeping track of, and the observers see the lies.
Because this isn't the simple case of propaganda when you try to reframe things, this is just made up shit.
Now the true question is: WHY THE HELL DOES CHINA KEEP THIS NARRATIVE FILLED WITH SUCH OBVIOUS LIES?
The answer is: no one does anything about it, neither did anything about it for years! Because of the short term benefits for some western countries.
Could it be an inaccurate translation? Yes.
Is China abusing their fishing fleets and actively try to dismiss that? Yes.
Is China actively implicated in lies and deception, and are observed doing it? Yes.
>Eh, my observation is about a recurring behavior from China
Can you clarify which behaviour you are referring to? It's been pointed out that the Chinese goal was to stabilize their fishing fleet size to around 3000, which given their normal growth focused policies seemed like some thing worthy of planning. And not propaganda as the parent comment was implying
Those 17000 vessels estimated by the ODI are likely not ships whose existence the Chinese government denies, but instead ships that are not classified as part of the distant-water fishing fleet even though they do venture far off the coast.
The recent episode with the Apple story on HN reveals how easy it is for emotional pile-ons to happen on something that may or may not be factual. I think cooler heads need to be prevailed upon to speak up and add some balance to discussions.
> 12,490 vessels without IMO or RFMO registrations but with active AIS signals outside Chinese waters at some point between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018.
AND
>AIS signal outside Chinese EEZ in 2017 or 2018
CTRL+F entire report "South China Sea", 1 hit from references. The fact that this point doesn't get any elaboration makes this report suspect as hell. That leaves 4,476 vessels, 927 foreign flagged (20.7%) consistent with Chinese numbers. Under 4.3.1 (pg 21): "around 20% of the world’s fishing vessels are registered in states to which they have no other connection". In that same paragraph it tries to use 927/16,966 to show Chinese share of foreign vessels is relatively small at 5.5% when using 4,447 its right at the 20% mark.
Also shifty eyes at 2.2.1 that tries to do a nominal comparison to EU/US DWF fleets but conveniently leaves out the other countries with the largested DWF fleet size (Taiwan, SK, Japan, Spain) [1]. Taiwan adjusted per capita would have a DWF fleet the size of 24k ships. S.Korea is around 5K ships which is in line with China, per capita, but it seems like relative numbers lke per capita is frowned upon if it doesn't make China look bad relative to regional peers.
https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-document...
[1] https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
A good rule of thumb when dealing with the CCP - multiply or divided all publicly-released stats and numbers by 10 to get closer to reality.
In a somewhat "positive" side effect of what they're doing, traditional Chinese medicine will probably go extinct together will all the fish and animal species they will wipe off the face of the Earth...
It may also be helped by the fact that Chinese eat quite a lot of fresh water fish compared to what we eat in Western countries.
Of course an issue is that it creates further pressure on agriculture/traditional fishing to produce fish feed...
We'll literally suck all the fish out of the ocean at the rate we're going, with our current processes.
I read some of piketty's book, capital and idéologie, and he sources work that show that if India and China have historically had a greater population, it's because Europeans love meat. And feeding a population on meat requires much more agricultural space than feeding on veggies and cereals alone. I had always wondered why it was, and I liked this explanation!
Eating other animals is what got us here. Until we can print actual, chemically identical meat on a conveyor belt, our reliance on animals will continue.
Am I? I became 100% vegetarian a year ago. No one around me was vegetarian. I saved money. I never ate so well and I'm in my best physical form ever. What is magical?
Also you've only been vegetarian a year. Being a vegetarian from birth to death without supplements would be much more difficult to do without major deficiencies.
Also vegetarians today have the option of buying food from all over the world, but that wasn't the case for the vast majority of human history.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6540890
https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/malnutr...
Guess where do you get folic acid, b12, etc from?
As a side note, OTC supplements are not as effective. You need prescription supplements if anyone is considering going vegetarian.
Another factor is, the number of insects that accidentally get into the food supply provide some protein. I remember reading about how a more primitive lifestyle leads to more insects being in the food supply, which provides some of the necessary protein for humans to thrive. But I can't find the link at the moment.
1: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/80-india...
I'm all for lab produced everything, but it's not good enough yet for me to feel comfortable trying to outsmart nature.
Everyone needs Omega 3/6/9. You can get it from nuts and algae. IF you want to be inefficient and introduce a middleman, you can get it from fish.
B12 is needed by everyone. The meat you eat has it supplemented. Again, you can cut out the middleman and get it directly as a supplement rather than having a cow killed.
Beef is ~1800lbs.
Not particularly efficient is it
fwiw - "vegetarian" doesn't count for animal well-being. Egg laying chickens and milk cows are treated really badly and their agony is rather prolonged for the duration of their "productive life".
[1] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/the-food-habits-of-a-na...
That counts for all animals, no?
Further, now they're putting oil in Salmon feedstock so they have imaginary dietary advantages i.e. Omega-3 fatty acid, which farm-raised salmon don't have much of normally.
So add that cost to raising salmon.
Animal husbandry is a great way of converting inputs unfit for human consumption (animal feed) into something that is (meat) but it’s never very efficient.
Ideally, yes. In practice, we feed animals mostly things that we ourselves could eat ourselves - like corn, soy, and grains. Sure, you can find cute examples of cattle eating grass on rocky soil... but around 99% of animals are not grown that way... they are grown in factory farms where they're fed soy, corn, and grains.
Meat is still a useful medium for converting what humans can't consume very well to something they can. Especially pigs, which in much of the world are used as recyclers (not in the west anymore, due to safety issues, and probably not for long in the undeveloped world, but they have bigger problems to worry about).
The undeveloped world or the pigs?
What are you going to do with the current people? They will all want a decent quality of life. Will you sacrifice your life and quality of life to achieve this greater goal you mention? Or do you just want "others" to sacrifice themselves for it?
https://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/all_publications/living_...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-thes...
https://theconversation.com/emissions-inequality-there-is-a-...
Also, yes, wealthy countries over consume. Collectively we just don't care. We can't even get people to wear a mask. I don't think there is a pragmatic way to convince the west to consume less.
Understandably, it's much harder to ask people to reduce their current way of life.
But technology still is the key here.
US household energy consumption actually dropped, resulting into overall leveled national consumption total [1]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/homes.php
They're doing that. Bring up an areal view of china's coast, zoom in on most any protected bay and you can see they have some kind of aquatic farming going on at a pretty impressive scale.
https://www.google.com/maps/@23.8785992,117.6354366,322m/dat...
https://www.google.com/maps/@23.6576045,117.4483416,171m/dat...
https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=d1e87c14-b29f-4173-a4f5-cbd56...
> They're doing that.
IIRC, most farmed fish are fed with fish meal, which is basically less-desirable wild-caught fish, so fish farming does not take the pressure off the oceans as much as you'd think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_meal
> The production and large-scale use of fishmeal are controversial. The lucrative market for fishmeal as a feed encourages corporate fisheries not to limit their yields of by-catch (from which fish meal is made), and thus leads to depletion of ecosystems, environmental damage, and the collapse of local fisheries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_farming
> Farming carnivorous fish, such as salmon, does not always reduce pressure on wild fisheries. Carnivorous farmed fish are usually fed fishmeal and fish oil extracted from wild forage fish.
Would be nice to be able to replace off-shore oil rigs with off-shore fishing farms that sell the produce directly to retail markets. Might even be able to run aquatic "farm to table" restaurants!
There's definitely at least an order magnitude more offshore aquaculture farms than there are oil-rigs currently.
That's a myth. This "problem" wasn't much of a problem, historically, since real-world communities would spontaneously develop regulatory practices to prevent over-exploitation of the commons:
> Political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded 2009's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on the issue, and others revisited Hardin's work in 1999.[45] They found the tragedy of the commons not as prevalent or as difficult to solve as Hardin maintained, since locals have often come up with solutions to the commons problem themselves.[46] For example, it was found that a commons in the Swiss Alps has been run by a collective of farmers there to their mutual and individual benefit since 1517, in spite of the farmers also having access to their own farmland. In general, it is in the interest of the users of a commons to keep them functioning and so complex social schemes are often invented by the users for maintaining them at optimum efficiency.[47][48] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Non-gov...)
Privatization is one solution, but it seems to often be falsely portrayed as the only solution. The wiki article has a decent list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Solutio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaculture#/media/File:Global...
What we need is to reduce the popularity of consuming "predator" fish species -- there is an abundant supply of forage fish, but these are often caught and fed to farmed fish! Sardines and herring aren't popular today, but they'd be a lot more appetizing and sustainable if we just froze them on the boat instead of grinding them into fishmeal to be fed to tilapia or salmon. See:
I don't know how to quantify the potential sustainable yield of forage fish vs. the human diet, but I know that eating small fish is more sustainable than feeding them to larger fish and eating those.
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean...
I've already witnessed the collapse of fishing in the oceans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
Or else we learn to manage resource or something.
Add to that the environmental impact, insane water usage, and the fact that meat production will continue to destroy economies through pandemics, and it should cost 10-15x more than it does now.
So I'm curious where that number comes from.
Just like roads. Most people in society want to be able to freely travel where they want and when they want to. So we subsidize roads as a society where the wealthy pay more in terms of taxes but everyone gets to use the roads.
So, we should subsidize things that people like? Should we subsidize sugar?
Most Americans are eating far more meat than doctors recommend.
Who should be the authority for what society finds value in, which policies are invoked, how taxes are distributed and spent if not the representatives of the people? Clerics? Doctors? Lawyers? Scientists? Sociologists? Bartenders?
Currently high quality beef imitations like B-On are not quite cost competitive with real ground beef. Basically it's taken us an additional ~100yr of supply chain growth to get to a technological point where plant beef is priced like beef was 100yr ago.
I feel very comfortable saying that any change that hits the low level commodities that underpin these things, fuel, grain, etc. would just exacerbate that difference and set plant based "transition foods" back.
In a healthy democracy, government's enforcement is mostly a force for good.
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-squid-climate.html https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/23/octopuse...
Let's say the Chinese have 15-20,000. What percentage is that of the entire industry? Are there 100,000 distant-water vessels active in the world? Or only 25,000 total?
If the Chinese represent 20% of the world industry, but are trying to feed 18% of the world's population, that doesn't seem outrageous. But if they represent 50% of the world industry, then my eyebrows go up.
At the same time, if the US represents 10% of the industry and 4% of world population, or if UK represents 3% of the industry but <1% of world population, doesn't that make it a bit hard to swallow?
Almost all of the numbers above are made up. I don't know what they really are. That's my point. I'm reluctant to grab my pitchfork with my current level of ignorance.
For comparison, the 2nd/3rd/4th largest distant-water fleets are Taiwan at around 400 and Japan and S. Korea at around 150-200 [0]. Probably the entire rest of the world accounts for less than 10% of foreign fishing.
[0] https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
Like, it just seems like a bad news generator and we constantly need to dance around the CCP trying to guide them appropriately with sanctions, and threats and incentives.
I understand depleting the oceans would be catastrophic, but how is this regime ever going to learn? Honest question?
Well someone has to choose what bad news to highlight and how biased to highlight said news. For example, per capita, Taiwan and S.Korea have larger DWF fleets, Taiwan significantly so. Factor in EEZ and you get a good idea of why.
China: 1400m ppl / 3000 dwf fleet / 900,000km2 eez (3.8m with disputes)
Taiwan: 24m / 414 / 90,000km2
Japan: 162m / 162 / 4,500,000km2
S.Korea: 52m / 198 / 300,00km2
Spain: 47m / 65 / 1,000,000km2
https://www.stimson.org/wp-content/files/file-attachments/St...
This EEZ map really explains a lot of tensions in these maritime disputes.
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7292/10134658063_fca4fc3da2_o...
This is already the case in most of the world, including many developing countries.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/120114/under...
Personally, I think people are an asset, not a burden, and the greatest things in the world! That's right, I mean you, dear reader. Straighten that back!
* The couple has just one child, who is handicapped or unable to work because of non-hereditary diseases. * Both parents are only children themselves, and have just one child so far.
* The couple adopted their first child because one of them was diagnosed as infertile.
* The couple remarried but have only one child in total.
* The couple are ethnic minorities who moved to the city from provinces bordering other countries and were given permission from a high-ranking Family Planning office before they moved.
* The husband has brothers, but only one brother is able to give birth, and the others have promised not to adopt.
* The husband is a farmer who married a woman already with a daughter (this only if that husband pledges to care for the woman’s parents).
* The couple are rural farmers, in which one spouse is a handicapped soldier with an injury grade B or above or can no longer work.
* The couple are farmers from the deep mountains who only have a daughter, depend on farming and are poor.
* Another exception to the one child policy allowed families in rural areas to have another child if the first child was a girl, in hopes to have a boy as their second child.
[0] https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=c5d870b...
But btw. many western countries have a shrinking population since years to a degree where that's an problem.
But this also means that the countries which have to take (reasonable) actions include many contribute which often can't afford more reasonable actions :/
Some as simple as reducing poverty.
Some by making it most viable to have one or two children.
Some (China) by limiting the number of children to roughly two.
...
Not all of this policies are good, not all are intentionally made to have that effect.
Still if you want to shrink a countries populations there are much more ways then a hard limit to the number of children (Which I think will hardly ever play out well.).
Then temporarily unsterilizing by winning the lottery, points, ability score, merit, money, whatever...
Simple, innit?
Any law which is not doing so and just enact it the same for any larger region (the world, or just whole of china) is bound to fail big time.
But there are a fiew things you should definitely do:
- Make sure not gender is valued above the other gender.
- No 1 child limit (instead of 2), with a 1 child limit we would have two people having one child, i.e. halving. Which is probably faster shrinking then any country can properly handle (i.e. after a while a horrible ratio of young to old people etc.). A two child limit still will cause shrinkage.
- Don't fixate the law on women, it's unreasonable and put's a further burden on them.
- Make sure your social system isn't incompatible with such a law before enacting it.
- Make sure society is compatible with such a law before enacting it.
- Make sure it's not turned into a money making machine.
- Consider regional differences.
Which would be a view points you should keep to which china didn't bother with at all.
Most problems of the past one child policy in china come from:
- Man being valued much more then woman now leading to there being much more of them then woman.
- To fast shrinkage puts the social system in danger as to view young people have to care for to many old people.
- The laws being abusive to woman.
- The laws unreasonable handling of children which under the law should not have been born but have been born anyway.
EDIT: Just to be clear, there are many more ways to (slowly) shrink a countries population which are based on subtle nudging society in the intended direction instead of enforcing any hard limit on the number of children. Which is probably what China should have done, tbh.
However, non of this will happen. We are still in a world where countries fight over getting more resources to consume. That needs to shift to fighting to protect resources. We need sanctions on countries that fish too much and have too high emissions. Otherwise we will be caught in the tragedy of the commons till the planet is uninhabitable.
Meanwhile we cannot even properly coordinate a response to a pandemic.
The major problem is skewed consumption and wastage due to structural poverty. That should be our focus, rather than expanding to another planet.
> the country’s commercial fishermen often serve as de-facto paramilitary personnel whose activities the Chinese government can frame as private actions.
???? The article doesn't go any further, but how would you use a bunch of unarmed fishing vessels crewed by "illiterates" (according to the article) for anything resembling a military purpose. Later on it mentions "crowding" but doesn't really go into detail about what that means.
Plus what is a "distant water fishing fleet"? The article gives numbers for overall number of fishing vessels and then "distant water fishing fleet", but only provides context for the later number by saying the US has only 300 such boats in its fleet. If a country with coasts on two oceans only has 300 of these, it has to be some really specific category of boat right? What makes this category important?
And of course there's the framing of the article, the fishing is done by private commercial fishers but apparently their entire country is to blame. I mean you can make some arguments about subsidies but then the article itself acknowledges that other countries also engage in similar level of subsidies.
Also there's this weird fixation on North Korea, where it claims the Chinese fishing fleet is depleting North Korean waters, but doesn't really tell us about whether or not that's done with North Korea's permission. It mentions that it would be technically illegal for NK to sell fishing rights, but that doesn't really bear any significance.
> As a journalist, his investigations typically focus on worker safety and the environment...
As you point out, Urbina has an undeniable preference for international law, regulation, and treaties pertaining to oceans and fisheries. These sentiments seem to align with the values promoted by the Yale School of the Environment [1]. The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
[1] https://environment.yale.edu/
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/china-illegal-fishing-fleet...
He might have an expert level knowledge on the topic, but he is using all the standard tricks journalists use to paint a narrative. Bringing up statistics without context and without defining the thing it's measuring, using technical terminology without explaining what it means, alluding to certain things without elaborating, and citing sources(if at all) in a way such that you have to spend a lot of time hunting down an actual document supporting his claims.
> The article links to an investigative report Urbina did for NBC [2] which describes the evidence.
evidence of what? I'm not denying that Chinese boats are fishing in North Korea. It still seems weird that in a situation where Chinese boats are fishing in North Korea's waters, the fixation is on sanctions. I can understand this being bad if North Korea doesn't want Chinese boats fishing in their waters but both articles seem to imply that there is implicit approval, in which case who cares? Sanctions are antithetical to free trade and human welfare.