A senior Chinese official has vowed to “break the long-established monopoly of developed countries” and make China the world’s top fisher of the high seas.
China will continue to invest in its long-distance fishing fleet and fishing equipment in order to increase the nation’s access to and extraction of fisheries resources on the high seas, said Yu Kangzhen, China’s vice minister for agriculture with responsibility for fisheries. He spoke at an event in Beijing this week to mark 30 years of the development of China’s long-distance fishing fleet.
China, according to Yu, has increased its catch four-fold since 2000. Remarkably, in the past 30 years, China has increased the scale of its long-distance fishing 300-fold, catching 2.030 million metric tons (MT) in 2014. That compares to 2,600 MT in 1985, claims Yu. Remarkably, the country fished CNY 18.5 billion (USD 2.96, EUR 2.59 billion) worth of fish from the high seas in 2014, 4,000 times higher than in 1985.
China is the world’s No. 1 harvester of squid and is at the “forefront” of global tuna extraction, according to Yu. Likewise, China is the top catcher and processor of Pacific saury and has taken an “important step forward” in tapping Antarctic krill resources, said Yu.
Control of high seas fishing resources will be central to China’s future as a seafood “great power,” said vice minister Yu. However, some of his calculations will raise eyebrows with conservationists: He told the Beijing forum that there are enough wild seafood resources in global seas to satisfy the protein needs of 30 billion people; also, the Antarctic can yield 100 million tons of krill per year – the equivalent of the entire current global wild catch, he said.
“We are moving steadily ahead from being a big long-distance fishing country to being a great power in long-distance fishing,” the vice minister told officials, journalists and bureaucrats running big state-owned fishing firms like Shanghai Kaichuang Marine International Co. Ltd. and China National Fishing Corporation (CNFC) Overseas Fishery Co., Ltd, which attended the forum in Beijing.
CNFC started out in 1985 with 13 vessels going into the Atlantic waters off western Africa. Since then China has put more than 2,000 vessels onto the high seas and has long-term deals with 40 countries’ exclusive economic zones in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans.
As China seeks to assert itself on the high seas, it is also building its navy for patrols of fishing grounds at home and abroad. China has vowed to build its own Coast Guard and establish naval bases in areas where its fishing fleets are active. The Namibian newspaper, for instance, in January reported the upcoming visit this spring by a Chinese delegation to Namibia for discussions on “plans for the proposed naval base in Walvis Bay.”
The Namibian reported that Beijing has told Namibian diplomats that a “Chinese naval presence will deter any would-be illegal trawlers and smugglers.”
