More on Seafood Prices

Nobody can deny inflation in food prices, and seafood is a major contributor to that. The biggest reason behind seafood price inflation is a supply-demand mismatch – the world as a whole is eating more than the seas can provide, with obvious long term consequences unless this is managed. But China is a major factor behind that mismatch (excerpt):

China's Real Offshore Disaster
There isn't much left for a million tons of light oil to kill.

Last Sunday's sinking of an Iranian oil tanker 180 miles off the coast of Shanghai certainly looks like an environmental disaster. Depending on how many of the ship's 1 million barrels of condensate were released into the ocean and not burned off, the accident could end up being one of the biggest oil spills in half a century. The irony? Even that wouldn't represent the biggest disaster to befall the area.

The fact is, thanks to massive overfishing in China's territorial waters, there isn't much marine life left to kill in the disaster zone. According to He Pemin of Shanghai Ocean University, those waters have been so denuded over the last three decades that fishermen "normally bypass the area and go further afield for a bigger catch."

It's a dark twist to an accident that has the potential to send oil drifting to the California coast. And it should encourage the Chinese government to rethink how it manages its marine environment. The need is urgent: China's hunger for seafood is fast outstripping its domestic resources. Consequences already loom, including food inflation, a depleted environment for the hundreds of millions of Chinese who live along the coast, and rising international tensions.

Chinese fishermen traditionally concentrated on inland and coastal waters. But as the economy opened up in the late 1970s and private fishing fleets grew in size, those areas were quickly fished out.

Seeing the industry as a jobs creator, local officials were loath to restrain it. The national government didn't do much better. Instead of crafting policies to sustain inshore fishing (by controlling catches and combating massive coastal pollution, for starters), authorities offered subsidies and technical support to help fishermen venture further offshore into the East China Sea. (The money also supported other "blue economy" industries such as shipbuilding and offshore drilling.) In 1985, just 10 percent of China's catch was netted in those far-flung fishing grounds; by 2000, it was 35 percent.

The shift was driven by a massive jump in China's seafood consumption as its population has become more affluent. Growth has averaged 7.9 percent annually since the late 1970s. Chinese seafood consumption increased 50 percent in just the last decade, to 62 million tons annually. That accounts for nearly two-thirds of global growth.

Lesson 1: Unless we do something to manage fisheries on a sustainable basis, the situation will only get worse.

Lesson 2: Politicians can say what they like, but no amount of fiddling with taxes or the local economy will make a difference. This is a global problem and needs a global solution.