Comment by femto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by femto | Hacker News Reader

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> As for fish, we prefer to maintain sustainable local fish stocks, and choose import.

There's hard evidence for this in the form of a map [1]. The light pixels close to the Australian coastline are Australian vessels fishing close in. The solid light areas further from the coast are other countries' vessels stripping the ocean bare. It's particularly obvious to the north east of Australia, where the solid line is the edge of Australia's exclusive economic zone. Minimal activity (dark) inside the zone, being stripped bare (light) outside the zone.

China may be listed as self-sufficient in fish, but its fish are not coming from near China [2]. Mind you, Australia's not helping if it's just buying from countries that are stripping stocks.

[1] https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/index?longitude=126.00884...

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-19/how-china-is-plunderi...

> We're screwed on coffee and chocolate.

If things get desperate, AU does have small coffee and cacao goring industries!

https://www.agca.au/

https://www.thechocolateprofessor.com/blog/australian-cacao

>China may be listed as self-sufficient in fish, but its fish are not coming from near China

PRC fishing is ~85% domestic aquaculture. THE HIGHEST RATIO OF SUSTAINABLE AQUACULTURE IN THE WROLD.

Of 15% remaining wild catch, ~50% is from east sea, i.e. PRC coast. So ~95% self sufficiency. ~98% including SCS, i.e. PRC definition of sovereign waters. Functionally, self sufficiency is at 100%, since PRC large aquaculture exporter.

All the distant fishing drama/propaganda is just 2-5% of PRC fishing, which per capita they underfish relative other major fishing distant water fishing actors like JP, SKR, TW, Spain etc. For reference PRC distant water catches like 1.5kg per capita, the others 3-30kg+, i.e. 2-20x PRC. TLDR is PRC is the largest aquaculture producer (absolute&relative) that also grossly under extracts from global commons relative to other DWF, unless one thinks PRC citizens entitled to less fish.

Hey maxglute, I could post verbatim what you did, changing only numbers.

Without a reliable source, your numbers are meaningless.

Trying to find an honest source about chinese economics is not possible, they don’t exist. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s widely known.

The prc doesn’t divulge this information accurately.

There's a good reason other countries are not heavily investing in aquaculture.

Pollution, pathogens and heavy use of antibiotics and vaccines required to keeping large numbers of fish in confined areas. It's not a solved problem at least in Australia and consumers prefer wild caught.

15% is still a large number. 15% of the Chinese population is 2/3 of the US population and 15x the population of Australia. That's a lot of wild caught fish.

But it's not just China. Fishing boats from Indonesia and other SE Asian countries are more often intercepted within Australia's economic exclusion zone.

You can make the same criticism for all terrestrial live stock, at least aquaculture has lowest feed conversion ratio, i.e. lower than chickens. World, especially east asia not going to go vegetarian, so aquaculture probably most ecological path to animal protein sufficiency / efficiency.

>That's a lot of wild caught fish

Note half of 15% wild catch is east sea, i.e. it's mostly in PRC EEZs. Most of other half in SCS, which is dispute shit show. We're really talking ~3% that is legitimately distant fishing, and to be blunt PRC, who due to geography as one of the LEAST EEZ to population / shore ratio (being surrounded by other island neighbours), only capturing 3-7% (if you include SCS) of total consumption via distant water is reasonable. Which is the "real" reason why PRC double down on aquaculture, they're simply large land country with huge population with high aquaculture appetite with limited EEZ resource.

Ultimately this something for UN to sort out, and because PRC reliance much less on high seas fish resource, you're going to hear bitching from other DWF actors way before PRC. In the meantime there's simply no reason for PRC to not DWF at her current per capita rate just because people who can't compare per capita eat up propaganda. The reality is PRC is 20% of global pop and wild catches about 20% of global catch. Has about comparable IUU misbehavior. Useful idiot behavior singling out PRC when many other fishing nations... who happen to be US partners, are not getting same lazy propaganda talking point for extracting much more per capita.

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