China Estimated to Dramatically Underreport Its Overseas Fishing Catch
From Scientific American:
It is a whopper of a catch, in more ways than one: China is under-reporting its overseas fishing catch by more than an order of magnitude, according to a study published on 23 March. The problem is particularly acute in the rich fisheries of West Africa, where a lack of transparency in reporting is threatening efforts to evaluate the ecological health of the waters.
Not only this is a big problem for fisheries management. This also is part of two interesting and on-going problems. First, it is the problem of getting good fisheries statistics out of China. Daniel Pauly, the scientist who led this current study, also led another study published in 2001 that showed that the catches reported by China for its coastal fisheries were radically over-reported. Funny how we have the opposite problem in China’s distant water fleet. This suggests there is quite the culture of number fudging throughout the industry.
Second, this is part of a trend towards illegal fishing in West Africa. As Agnew et al. noted in 2009, West Africa is a hotbed of illegal fishing activity. Chinese, Taiwanese, and EU vessels have been the clear culprits, but no good numbers have been available to know the scale of their illegal fishing. We’ve got our first good picture of illegal fishing in West Africa thanks to this study.
I think the research is also quite phenomenal as the study’s methodology was part-journalism, part-economics. Here’s on the method:
Fishing contracts between Chinese companies and African nations are secret, so to estimate the catch, Pauly and his team had to do some sleuthing. The picture was further clouded because Chinese companies sometimes operate vessels flying local flags. So at least ten researchers combined clues from field interviews, scholarly articles and newspaper and online reports in 14 languages to estimate how many Chinese fishing vessels were operating in 93 countries and territories. They found many in nations where China reported no catch. The estimates were averaged to reach their conclusion: China had at least 900 ocean-going vessels, with 345 in West Africa, including 256 bottom-trawlers. [bold added]
Digging into the nitty gritty details, I found the ‘crowd-sourcing’ of expert knowledge quite interesting. I think it is fair to say it means the article shows there is a serious problem, but that we should go bandying about the exact estimated catch numbers. Sometimes crowds are wrong and I would challenge that the experts used had gained knowledge independent of the other experts. As written in the article:
The large number of project members involved in the estimation of the number of Chinese distant-water vessels operating in the EEZ of various countries (always >10 persons; including many of the authors of ‘catch reconstructions’ (sensu Zelleret al. 2007a) in the region of interest), and the independence of their individual estimates prior to computing the averages was to allow for the ‘wisdom of crowd’ effect to work. This enables a large number of informed estimates to converge towards the correct values, as they will do when they are truly independent (see Surowiecki 2005; for a detailed account; Galton 1907; for the first well-documented case; and Herzog and Hertwig 2009; for recent methodological improvements).
Furthermore, it’s worth considering how ‘Chinese vessel’ was defined. It was not based on the flag of the vessel, but on the crew composition.
We define ‘Chinese vessels’ as boats with officers and crew from the People’s Republic of China (but excluding the Macau and Hong Kong Special Administrative Regions, which do not have distant-water fleets, and Taiwan, which does), irrespective of their flag. Hong Kong is, however, where the large Pacific Andes Corporation is headquartered (partly owned by the Chinese Government) and which operates in 32 countries (Pacific Andes 2012). Pacific Andes’ vessels, for the most part included in this account (if under diverse flags), were involved in massive overfishing in the south-east Pacific (Rosenblum 2012). We made the above vessel definition choice for two reasons: firstly, because there are likely few (if any) instances in which a fishing boat that is not owned, directly or indirectly, by a Chinese firm (irrespective of the flag flown) is operated by Chinese officers and crew; and secondly, because of the widespread use of ‘flags of convenience’ as well as ‘charter’ and ‘joint venture’ arrangements, which render difficult the identification of actual beneficial ownership and prevent proper compensation through access fees. Indeed, the flag a vessel is flying often has little bearing on the beneficial ownership of the landed catch (Griggs and Lugten 2007).
Bonus quote:
Fisheries scientists find the latest assessment startling. “So that’s where my fish were going!” says Didier Gascuel at the European University of Brittany in Rennes, France, who is a member of the scientific committee that advises Mauritania and the EU on fishing agreements. Year after year, Mauritanian populations of bottom-dwelling species such as octopus, grouper and sea bream have remained stubbornly low — a sign of overfishing by bottom-scraping trawlers, he says. “We had no idea the Chinese catch was so big and of course we never included it our models,” he says.
