The Pirates of China: Illegal Outsourcing On The High Seas
The fish we eat in our homes, or in a restaurant usually comes from a fish market or a supermarket. That's about the only thing in the last 50 years that hasn't changed about our fish. Fishing has become an incredibly complicated… and competitive… industry that spans the world's oceans and involves most of the countries on earth.
Technology, changing views about ownership of the oceans, politics and the depletion of ocean life makes it harder to find the fish that we demand, making fishing fleets travel ever farther from home to pursue finned treasures.
The pressure to bring home an ever larger harvest of fish is so high that governments and fishing fleets are working together to steal the fish of other nations! The outsourcing of fishing has turned into outsourcing piracy!
Long ago, fishing was a very local industry; it had to be. Fish did not stay fresh for very long, so you needed to sell it close to where you caught it. There were early attempts to freeze fish, and other foods, but the results were very unsatisfactory. Defrosted foods turned mushy and were less than appealing. The culprit was ice crystals. When you slowly freeze foods, long ice crystals form, and the crystals puncture cell walls. This gives food the mushy feeling and lackluster taste.
Then, along came a gentleman by the name of Birdseye (unlike Aunt Jemima, Clarence Birdseye was indeed a real person), was a naturalist working for the government in the arctic and noticed how Inuit tribes exposed fresh fish to cold air to flash freeze it. Birdseye patented a process for industrial flash freezing, and fresh fish could be shipped around the world.
By the middle of the last century, the fishing industry realized that rather than catching fish and then trying to rush back home to freeze it, it made more sense to build massive ship/factories that caught, dressed, packaged and froze the fish at sea.
Half a century later, and high-tech fishing fleet have added GPS, satellite tracking of schools of fish, and computer assisted weather predictions to ensure that the maximum number of fish are caught. Obviously, this process is a LONG way from the ideal of a single fisherman in a small boat, as we read about in such classic stories as Hemingway's “The Old Man and the Sea."
Industrial fishing has become the domain of mega corporations or national governments. Corporations have to become ever more aggressive fishers in order to keep up their profits, but nations not only have to worry about the jobs that fishing provides they also need to remember that they need to the fish to keep their citizens fed. The country that does the most fishing, as well as eating the most fish is far and away… China. Which is also the country that is accused of the most outlandish fishing piracy.
China population is highly dependent upon fish for feeding their population. Their internal aquaculture produces over 32 million tons of fish. Add to that another 17 million tons of fish from the sea. China harvests so many fish that they can both feed their own nation (the largest on earth) and sell to the rest of the world including the United States.
By one estimate, as much as 80% of the seafood sold in the US today comes from offshore sources, with the largest share coming from China. However, the fishing harvests that China has made may be far greater than these numbers tell us. Because there are certain fishing restrictions, it is not always in China’s interests to report the full extent of their harvest. Even when there are not restrictions, a massive increase in fishing by China could lead to changes in the law or tighter oversight by the United Nations.
International researchers observing the activities of Chinese's fishing fleets off of Africa show indicate that they have reported less than 10% of the fish that they caught. If the official record rose from 370,000 to 4,100,000 tons, does this mean that the 17 million tons harvested around the world is really 50 million tons… 100 million… or more?
If China is dramatically under-reporting their harvests, it does help explain the unexpectedly rapid depletion of the world’s ocean life. This depletion seems to be happening the fastest between China and Japan, where swarms of jelly fish have replaced the diverse life that formerly populated the sea of China. In other parts of the world, Chins’ fishing fleets seem to be getting help from the Chinese government to track the navies and coast guards of other nations, so that they can follow large schools of fish into the territorial waters of other nations, and escape before they are impounded by the local police.
Just as the pirates of old were emboldened by early successes and targeted towns and villages, this new generation of pirates has crossed into the territories of other countries, landed and stolen endangered animals that can be used in exotic dishes. Recently, one of these pirate boats got stuck on a reef in the Philippines, where their rescuers discovered 22,000 pounds of meat from pangolin anteaters, a highly endangered species. The animals had already been skinned, frozen and boxed before they were discovered.
A couple of decades ago, it may have made a lot of sense to rely on China for seafood. At the time, it would have been very difficult to credibly project that buying a few fish from China would create a powerhouse who is dominates the high seas, and ravaging the oceans. Because of falsified reporting, and world-wide reach, it is difficult to say exactly what… and how much… China is actually harvesting. What we can say is that the outsourcing of America’s (and many other nation’s) fishing is now bringing about many unexpected negatives.
In the past, the nations of the world got together to put an end to piracy on the high seas. Can the nations of the 21st century also get together to stop the piracy OF the high seas?
Technology, changing views about ownership of the oceans, politics and the depletion of ocean life makes it harder to find the fish that we demand, making fishing fleets travel ever farther from home to pursue finned treasures.
The pressure to bring home an ever larger harvest of fish is so high that governments and fishing fleets are working together to steal the fish of other nations! The outsourcing of fishing has turned into outsourcing piracy!
Long ago, fishing was a very local industry; it had to be. Fish did not stay fresh for very long, so you needed to sell it close to where you caught it. There were early attempts to freeze fish, and other foods, but the results were very unsatisfactory. Defrosted foods turned mushy and were less than appealing. The culprit was ice crystals. When you slowly freeze foods, long ice crystals form, and the crystals puncture cell walls. This gives food the mushy feeling and lackluster taste.
Then, along came a gentleman by the name of Birdseye (unlike Aunt Jemima, Clarence Birdseye was indeed a real person), was a naturalist working for the government in the arctic and noticed how Inuit tribes exposed fresh fish to cold air to flash freeze it. Birdseye patented a process for industrial flash freezing, and fresh fish could be shipped around the world.
By the middle of the last century, the fishing industry realized that rather than catching fish and then trying to rush back home to freeze it, it made more sense to build massive ship/factories that caught, dressed, packaged and froze the fish at sea.
Half a century later, and high-tech fishing fleet have added GPS, satellite tracking of schools of fish, and computer assisted weather predictions to ensure that the maximum number of fish are caught. Obviously, this process is a LONG way from the ideal of a single fisherman in a small boat, as we read about in such classic stories as Hemingway's “The Old Man and the Sea."
Industrial fishing has become the domain of mega corporations or national governments. Corporations have to become ever more aggressive fishers in order to keep up their profits, but nations not only have to worry about the jobs that fishing provides they also need to remember that they need to the fish to keep their citizens fed. The country that does the most fishing, as well as eating the most fish is far and away… China. Which is also the country that is accused of the most outlandish fishing piracy.
China population is highly dependent upon fish for feeding their population. Their internal aquaculture produces over 32 million tons of fish. Add to that another 17 million tons of fish from the sea. China harvests so many fish that they can both feed their own nation (the largest on earth) and sell to the rest of the world including the United States.
By one estimate, as much as 80% of the seafood sold in the US today comes from offshore sources, with the largest share coming from China. However, the fishing harvests that China has made may be far greater than these numbers tell us. Because there are certain fishing restrictions, it is not always in China’s interests to report the full extent of their harvest. Even when there are not restrictions, a massive increase in fishing by China could lead to changes in the law or tighter oversight by the United Nations.
International researchers observing the activities of Chinese's fishing fleets off of Africa show indicate that they have reported less than 10% of the fish that they caught. If the official record rose from 370,000 to 4,100,000 tons, does this mean that the 17 million tons harvested around the world is really 50 million tons… 100 million… or more?
If China is dramatically under-reporting their harvests, it does help explain the unexpectedly rapid depletion of the world’s ocean life. This depletion seems to be happening the fastest between China and Japan, where swarms of jelly fish have replaced the diverse life that formerly populated the sea of China. In other parts of the world, Chins’ fishing fleets seem to be getting help from the Chinese government to track the navies and coast guards of other nations, so that they can follow large schools of fish into the territorial waters of other nations, and escape before they are impounded by the local police.
Just as the pirates of old were emboldened by early successes and targeted towns and villages, this new generation of pirates has crossed into the territories of other countries, landed and stolen endangered animals that can be used in exotic dishes. Recently, one of these pirate boats got stuck on a reef in the Philippines, where their rescuers discovered 22,000 pounds of meat from pangolin anteaters, a highly endangered species. The animals had already been skinned, frozen and boxed before they were discovered.
A couple of decades ago, it may have made a lot of sense to rely on China for seafood. At the time, it would have been very difficult to credibly project that buying a few fish from China would create a powerhouse who is dominates the high seas, and ravaging the oceans. Because of falsified reporting, and world-wide reach, it is difficult to say exactly what… and how much… China is actually harvesting. What we can say is that the outsourcing of America’s (and many other nation’s) fishing is now bringing about many unexpected negatives.
In the past, the nations of the world got together to put an end to piracy on the high seas. Can the nations of the 21st century also get together to stop the piracy OF the high seas?
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