August is corporate conference season in China. That means local corporations – including the big Chinese seafood producers – spend days cloistered in meeting halls for annual marketing conferences where strategy is set. A constant refrain at this year’s conferences was sustainability – that is, economic and environmental sustainability of fisheries and seafood in China.
Firms have been jolted by several major environmental catastrophes, and authorities in Qingdao have flagged a fall-off in the number of hectares available to mariculture. This is crucial given Qingdao (and surrounding coastal Shandong province) is a heartland of Chinese mariculture – which has been seen as a solution to the increasing shortage of land available for aquaculture in China.
“Branding” and “value add” have been two other terms conspicuously present in the statements firms like Baiyang and Guolian and Zhangzidao have issued from their respective annual conferences held recently. And the body that represents them, China Aquatic Products Promotion & Marketing Association (CAPPMA), meanwhile has been prodding and training fishery firms to improve their branding as well as the value add proposition.
CAPPMA says China’s seafood sector lacks brands – or at least brands accepted and trusted by local consumers who are now transitioning from wet markets to supermarket shopping. All the while consumers are regularly appalled by local media reports of seafood contaminated by over-glazing and overuse of antibiotics.
Anyone reading all the various statements will conclude that there is clearly a confluence of common sustainability goals being targeted by seafood stakeholders in China, which the stakeholders believe can be harnessed to collectively improve sustainability in China. Aside from corporates and CAPPMA, the national quality watchdog Administration of Quality Safety Inspection & Quarantine (AQSIQ) has been issuing shrill warnings to seafood exporters to desist from over-using antibiotics which show up in testing by authorities in key export markets.
Also on the government side, the fishery bureau of China’s agricultural ministry has been driving a year-long campaign to get aquaculture producers using more quality feed and (less) medicinal inputs. This is to cap the ministry’s five-year plan (which runs till the end of this year) which has prioritized “re-construction, standardization and registration” of the country’s aquaculture ponds to improve productivity and quality of China’s farmed seafood.
Despite the obvious need for credible quality and sustainability certification and training schemes to complement the various corporate and government quality schemes underway, internationally accepted sustainability certification schemes have made very little progress in China. While racing each other to establish a presence in China, various international certification schemes and bodies privately say they have struggled to make any headway in the country given the huge territory and the fragmented nature of the industry as well as the various turf wars between government agencies tasked with policing the fisheries sector. They also say that many Chinese seafood firms don’t want to pay the costs of certification for the domestic market.
There are more fundamental reasons at play also. Chinese consumers have long been bombarded by logos and claims by food producers (though hopefully however the new advertising law which came into force this week will force more accountability on food brands). This has confused consumers and diluted and devalued the purpose of certification schemes. Case in point: on a recent visit to a Beijing supermarket I counted three separate “green” certifications (only one of them semi-official) as well as the official Chinese organic certification while I browsed food products.
At the corporate level there’s a perception among companies here that sustainability schemes are costly and required only for export markets. And then China mistrusts multinational NGOs, especially on its home turf. On the other hand, China doesn’t allow frank or open debate of government policy and discussion of China’s role in worldwide illegal fishing isn’t encouraged. Likewise, China’s fisheries ministry is closely aligned to state-owned fishing companies with increasingly large stakes in the global wild-catch sector.
This all suggests that a certification process aimed at China’s domestic market will be a local creation borrowing on some international best practice. On the other hand consumer mistrust of copious local certification schemes means there’s room for a strict and credible international scheme to take hold in China. There is a compromise somewhere, but it will take several years to emerge.
