It’s a story that makes for an easy headline. The Straits Times (Singapore) in late August ran a lengthy article repeating much of the material in a June article by Britain’s Guardian newspaper – among others – on how China is going to reduce its per capita consumption of meat and seafood by half in order to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The Guardian article suggested “the Chinese government has outlined a plan to reduce its citizens’ meat consumption by 50 percent, in a move that climate campaigners hope will provide major heft in the effort to avoid runaway global warming.”
The article quoted from a Chinese government nutrition guideline published by the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), which recommended that China’s consumers should eat between 40 and 75 grams of seafood per day, a reduction on the 50-to-75-gram figure in the guidelines issued in 2007.
Sounds great, but where does the 50 percent reduction come from? China continues to pursue some very ambitious goals in increasing its fisheries output: its latest official Five Year Plan (which kicks in this year) commits the country to producing 73 million tons of seafood in 2020 and 77 million tons in 2024. Last year, it produced 66.9 million tons, up 3.8 percent year-on-year. Similarly ambitious targets have been set for local red and white meat production.
And yet the Guardian article quotes a Chinese official, Li Junfeng, director general of China’s National Center on Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (also China’s head negotiator in Paris) as saying: “Through this kind of lifestyle change, it is expected that the livestock industry will transform and carbon emissions will be reduced.”
Li appears not to have consulted his colleagues in government. Beijing wants to increase seafood exports to 5.4 million tons in 2024 – up from 4.1 million tons in 2014. This is ambitious stuff and seems to contradict other goals promulgated by the agriculture ministry – and by the deputy head of fisheries at the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation (himself a former Chinese official) who called this month on China to stop obsessing about increasing quantity and instead commit itself to improving the quality of its seafood.
That would mean cutting the use of antibiotics, reducing pollution associated with aquaculture, and cracking down harder on illegal fishing in its waters (and presumably neighboring waters). And it would mean abandoning Stalinist-style seafood production targets while focusing on quality and safety of production.
China spends USD 4.5 billion (EUR 4 billion) per year on subsidies to its fisheries sector, and that figure is likely to be underestimated – certainly if you factor in all the diplomatic support and door-opening provided the national fisheries sector by Chinese embassies around the world.
Reckless environmental practices and volume-driven production are key reasons why Asian seafood production went from 10 million tons in 1960 to 80 million tons in 2010. Asia has gone from accounting for 30 percent of capture fisheries in 1950 to 68 percent in 2013 – of which China accounts for 32 percent. The Asian fleet has doubled since 1980 and there’s an incredible 1.7 million trawlers in the hotly contested South China Sea.
This will have to change if China is serious about the kind of moderation in seafood consumption. Sadly, newspapers keep putting out dramatic headlines about Chinese seafood consumption set to fall dramatically because the government says so. The problem with that analysis is that government also has competing, very different agendas, judging from its blueprint Five Year Plan: to increase production (and, presumably, consumption) of meat and seafood.
If China ends artificially low prices and harmful production practises Chinese seafood would become less cheap and plentiful and of more reliable traceability and quality. The result would be an upward impact on global seafood prices as imports become competitive with domestic production. The topic of sustainability will be debated in depth at the upcoming Seafood Expo Asia in Hong Kong in early September. Watch this space for reports on that discussion. In the meantime treat reports of dramatic reductions in Chinese seafood consumption with the scepticism they deserve.
