Degrading the Oceans, One Species at a Time.

Climate change as a distraction. Interesting idea but, sadly, true. We give a good bit of attention to climate change or the major impacts - droughts, heavy floods, severe storm events on increasing frequency, intensity and duration. Bad stuff, already killing plenty of victims in poor and vulnerable nations, plenty more to follow. But what are we missing?

In a world of woes we're vulnerable to allowing one issue to obscure others. Climate change seems to distract us from other looming catastrophes, especially mankind's excess consumption of Earth's resources. One of these essential resources now teetering on the edge of exhaustion is the global fishery.

Around the world industrial fishing fleets are "fishing down the food chain." This entails harvesting the most desirable species to "commercial extinction" before moving on to the next, slightly less desirable, species and repeating the same process.

For a long time the fishery-villains were the Europeans who sent their fleets north, west and south in pursuit of whatever they could bring in. Now, according to a New York Times report, China's industrial fishing fleet is piling on.


Overfishing is depleting oceans across the globe, with 90 percent of the world’s fisheries fully exploited or facing collapse, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. From Russian king crab fishermen in the west Bering Sea to Mexican ships that poach red snapper off the coast of Florida, unsustainable fishing practices threaten the well-being of millions of people in the developing world who depend on the sea for income and food, experts say.

But China, with its enormous population, growing wealth to buy seafood and the world’s largest fleet of deep-sea fishing vessels, is having an outsize impact on the globe’s oceans.

Increasingly, China’s growing armada of distant-water fishing vessels is heading to the waters of West Africa, drawn by corruption and weak enforcement by local governments. West Africa, experts say, now provides the vast majority of the fish caught by China’s distant-water fleet. And by some estimates, as many as two-thirds of those boats engage in fishing that contravenes international or national laws.

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According to one study by Greenpeace, subsidies for some Chinese fishing companies amount to a significant portion of their income. For one large state-owned company, CNFC Overseas Fisheries, the $12 million diesel subsidy it received last year made the difference between profit and loss, according to a corporate filing.

“Chinese fleets are all over the world now, and without these subsidies, the industry just wouldn’t be sustainable,” said Li Shuo, a global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia. “For Senegal and other countries of West Africa, the impact has been devastating.”

“We are facing an unprecedented crisis,” said Alassane Samba, a former director of Senegal’s oceanic research institute. “If things keep going the way they are, people will have to eat jellyfish to survive.”

When it comes to global fishing operations, China is the indisputable king of the sea. It is the world’s biggest seafood exporter, and its population accounts for more than a third of all fish consumption worldwide, a figure growing by 6 percent a year.

Overfishing is a global problem. Like many crises it's least felt in the relatively affluent nations, especially those with large coastlines and inshore fish stocks. The poorest third of the world for whom fish represent their major source of food protein will, once again, take it in the neck.

What China is doing is what European fishing fleets have done for centuries, plying distant coasts wherever fish stocks remain available. There seems to be no will to stop until global fish stocks are fully collapsed. We're already 90% of the way there.