China’s coastal aquaculture sector could be about to get a policy boost judging by a flurry of documents coming out of Beijing’s policy-making corridors recently.
In a sign that China is grappling with marine pollution and coastal erosion — while also trying to spur new sources of economic growth from its seas — last week the state council, or cabinet, approved the marine development plans of eight coastal provinces. This follows the approval in April of the Marine Functional Zoning Scheme (2011-2020). A separate 2012 China Oceans Development Report, issued in June, pointed to excessive amounts of hydrocarbon pollution in all of China’s sea waters.
The latest official documents include maps of zones marked out for aquaculture, marine conservation and sea reclamation areas in the eight regions — all of this approved by central government — including 16,100 hectares in southerly Guangxi, a relatively poor south-coast province which has recently drawn investors seeking a lower cost base. Officially, the goal of the blueprint is to safeguard and modernize the country’s fisheries sector.
Marine conservation may not, however, be the primary motivation of China’s coastal provinces, traditionally wealthier than other regions, have been casting around for new sources of growth following a government-enforced credit squeeze on the frothy real estate sector. In its plan, Liaoning province (which encapsulates the import port and processing hub of Dalian) wants to increase its “marine production” to RMB 900 billion (USD 143.9 billion, EUR 11.045 billion) by 2015 while the comparatively less developed provinces of Hainan and Guangxi both want to double their marine production values to RMB 110 billion (USD 17.5 billion, EUR 13.5 billion) and RMB 47 billion (USD 7.5 billion, EUR 5.8 billion) respectively.
It’s not clear what percentage of “marine production” value will come from edible marine products given that offshore oil exploration is being pushed by China’s regional governments as a source of energy and revenue. Clearly China needs to take action to repair damage done to coastlines by industrial pollution and unregulated sewage discharge. Environmentalists have calculated that China’s lost more than half of its coastal wetlands in the last decade alone. Real estate developers have also wreaked havoc, building high-end properties on the coastlines of Hainan and Shandong in areas previously reserved for fishing.
Coastal development is, in theory, governed by a government-alloted quota system. Getting such a quota allows holders to acquire certificates permitting them to use state owned land. This in turn can be used as security in applying for loans — a favorite ploy of real estate developers. Of all the coastal regions, the city of Tianjin has taken the harshest measures, allotting only 9,200 hectares for coastal reclamation while the province of Zhejiang allotted 50,600 hectares to be reclaimed up to 2020.
The national blueprint issued in April (Marine Functional Zoning Scheme (2011-2020)) sets six goals to be achieved by 2020. One of them is to increase the coastal aquaculture acreage to 26,000 square kilometers. Another demands the “reconstruction” of 2,000 kilometers of coastline. Maritime experts are skeptical. Professor Liu Shugang at the Ocean University of China sees the new blueprints as “efforts to create a blue economy rather than coming up with a coherent plan for ocean use and protection.”
Overfishing is another challenge. A visit to fishing ports in Shandong province suggested China’s ocean fishing resources have been stretched to extremes. This writer observed fishing boats pull into two fishing villages near the city of Yantai bearing small catches of predominantly younger fish. Such a sight is corroborated by Mo Zhaolan, a researcher at China’s Institute of Oceanology, who told the Economic Information Daily recently that previously important fishing grounds like the South China Sea coast and theGulf of Tonkin are so badly degraded by pollution and land reclamation thatthey “exist only in name.”
Elsewhere, there’s speculation in Beijing that China may create a “super ministry” for agriculture which would combine fisheries and forestry. This is seen by international observers in Beijing as a way to increase the power of such a ministry in the overall decision-making process, as China tries to halt depletion of arable land and maritime resources.
China officially kept its fish catch at zero-growth during the 11th Five Year Plan (2006-2010) while fishing bans (nominally three months in length) have been placed on all the country’s fishing zones, including the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
