Zhoushan, China’s leading distant-water fishing port, has announced a sharp increase in its incoming shipments of squid so far this year.
Year-on-year landings through October rose to 340,000 metric tons (MT), up from 300,000 MT in 2019, thanks to a bigger haul by Chinese boats in South Atlantic waters this autumn. The announcement, by the Zhoushan Distant Water Fishing Base – which claims to be China’s largest offloading point for distant-water vessels – comes after an autumn in which campaigners, fishermen, and legislators in Ecuador and Peru protested the arrival of hundreds of Chinese vessels headed south in pursuit of squid.
Zhoushan’s larger squid haul comes as another Chinese fishing company, Pingtan Marine, announced had conducted talks with Guolian Aquatic about “deep processing” squid it’s caught in several seas, including the South Atlantic.
The government-run Zhoushan Distant Water Fishing Base has outlined an economic plan that combines seafood with tourism and consumer goods like cosmetics and wellness products derived from distant-water operations. That plan recently advanced when the base was granted National 4A Tourism status by the national government, along with the surrounding town of Dinghai, according to Lin Zhi Gang, head of construction at the Zhoushan base.
Visitors can now tour a show room featuring presentations on the seafood products brought to the base by distant-water fishing companies based there. Tourists can buy seafood on-site, eat in restaurants, and buy value-added products like face masks made from hyaluronic acid (extracted from fish eyeballs) which has anti-aging properties for human skin.
Zhoushan’s push to center its economy around its distant-water fishing sector comes after the national government recently published a new white paper on distant-water fishing this month, which noted the country has licensed 2,701 vessels to operate internationally. That’s far below the estimate recently produced by the London, United Kingdom-based Overseas Development Institute, which estimated China has more than 15,000 distant-water vessels in operation. It’s unclear if the figure offered in the white paper counts vessels owned by Chinese fishing companies that fly other nations’ flags or those that operate through Chinese subsidiaries in countries like Ghana.
China initiated its distant-water fishing operations in 1985, “operating under U.N. laws of the sea,” according to the white paper, which lists a number of regional fisheries management organizations to which the country is a signatory. China is “fully compliant” with the rules of the RFMOs, the white paper said.
Photo courtesy of Victor Jiang/Shutterstock
