China is grossly under-reporting its harvest of fish outside its territorial waters, a University of B.C.-led study suggests.
The study, published in the journal Fish and Fisheries, estimates the Chinese foreign fleet catches 12 times more than reported to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, an international agency that keeps track of global fisheries catches.
Catch levels are critical when determining sustainable catch limits and are an important indicator of the state of the ocean.
The catch is estimated at $11.5 billion US or 4.6 million tonnes per year, taken from the waters of at least 90 countries, including 3.1 million tonnes from African waters, mainly West Africa.
The estimates follow an intensive assessment of the type of fishing vessels used by Chinese operators around the world and their catch capacity.
“We need to know how many fish have been taken from the ocean in order to figure out what we can catch in the future,” Daniel Pauly, principal investigator of UBC’s Sea Around Us Project and the study’s lead author, said in a release Wednesday.
“Countries need to realize the importance of accurately recording and reporting their catches and step up to the plate, or there will be no fish left for our children.”’
The report was criticized, however, by an official with the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Richard Grainger, chief of statistics for the organization, said he knows the number of catches reported from China is too low but he still feels the figures in the UBC study are “highly unlikely.’’
Pauly was also involved in a study in 2001 that accused China of grossly misleading the United Nations for more than a decade about the state of its fisheries, effectively masking a steady decline in the world’s fish stocks.
Official statistics showed the world fish catch had been rising by 0.33 million tonnes annually since 1988, but the UBC study estimated it had been not rising but declining by 0.36 million tonnes per year.
The study attributed the false data to the Chinese system, whereby fishery managers — unlike factory managers — are given catch quotas that increase annually whether or not there are enough fish to fill them. These managers then falsified catch documents to satisfy their superiors and improve their chances of promotion, the study said.
with files from Canadian Press