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China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

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Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it has reached the cost of renewing the resource. Taxing externalities isn't about "guaranteeing everyone can have access to the resource": that's circular. Taxing externalities is about ensuring that those who profit from a public good, also pay the public for the value of that good. Hypothetical: If tomorrow it turns out that eating beef is somehow the ultimate cause of environmental destruction, and every cow…

The solution to fossil fuels was not make gas cost 20 dollars a gallon (or an imagined unbounded amount) so only people who really need to drive can afford it. It was serious research into many different forms of energy. There are many old people who have their lively hoods tied to the fact that we ignore the science, but we do have solutions. Propose some kind of research into lab grown meat, extremely cheap feed, o…

A pigovian tax is not mutually exclusive with those options— in fact it incentivizes them. No need to do market planning for “lab grown meat” or whatever is the central planner’s fancy du jour: set a price and let the market figure it out.

Why have governments pick and choose “winning energy strategies” when you can let the market do it?

Literally how it works in practice with carbon credits today, your assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weekly multi-ton carbon-footprint private jet trips for me, cardboard drinking straws for thee.

Its not the billionaires advocating for cardboard straws

who said anything about billionaires? The term used by gp was "the rich", and that's much broader than billionaires

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry - the thing that comes to the front of my mind is trawling all the way in Ecuador, a world over. You’re saying Japan does that as well?

AFAIK JP doesn't trawl, they're big on transhipment, i.e. PRC, TW, SKR, Spain does stuff off Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and there's shadiness with moving haul to JP transhipment reefers (big fridge boat) i.e. offload catch so they can fish in region longer, JP basically launders, they're part of the IUU ecosystem. Also trawling all the way over in Ecuador / Peru reports are basically weasle words for saying mostly legi…

Did some looking around and your claims seem correct. I hope we have another UNCLOS convention soon! Too many bad actors, looks like every major distant-fishing power is polluting / overfishing.

I'd quibble with the PRC being the most sustainable producer, there's more to ecology than just fishing vs no fishing, but it's not a major point. And my biggest concern is with absolute scale (44% of the overall fishing effort makes it an outsize impact no matter what! it's kinda like how the US Army ROE matter more than most country army ROE simply because we're engaged more. Hard to address a global problem without focusing on its largest driver.), although, as you probably feel, the solution for that is a new UNCLOS, not singling out the PRC.

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#84
post #34
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tasmania produces a lot of caged salmon. It’s bad for the salmon (in terms of animal welfare) and it’s wrecking the local ecosystems. It’s not any sort of panacea. We need to stop destroying ocean ecosystems, not just shift the damage around. Overfishing of wild stock, habitat destruction through bottom-trawling and intensive fish farming all need to be properly looked at.

> We need to stop destroying ocean ecosystems, not just shift the damage around. Overfishing of wild stock, habitat destruction through bottom-trawling and intensive fish farming all need to be properly looked at. You criticise, yet don't provide any suitable recommendations or alternatives. People like to eat fish and have done so since the beginning of our species.

> People like to eat fish and have done so since the beginning of our species.

The slaves are necessary to the economic welfare of the south and have been a corner of empire economies for millennia.

People like to drink wine sweetened with lead and have been doing so since we can remember.

How are we even going to get rain without the sacrifices?

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK JP doesn't trawl, they're big on transhipment, i.e. PRC, TW, SKR, Spain does stuff off Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and there's shadiness with moving haul to JP transhipment reefers (big fridge boat) i.e. offload catch so they can fish in region longer, JP basically launders, they're part of the IUU ecosystem. Also trawling all the way over in Ecuador / Peru reports are basically weasle words for saying mostly legi…

Did some looking around and your claims seem correct. I hope we have another UNCLOS convention soon! Too many bad actors, looks like every major distant-fishing power is polluting / overfishing. I'd quibble with the PRC being the most sustainable producer, there's more to ecology than just fishing vs no fishing, but it's not a major point. And my biggest concern is with absolute scale (44% of the overall fishing effo…

That's part of Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction discussion at UN, ongoing last few years, very slow going because contested. Will be supplementary to UNCLOS if/once passed. TBH there's no way it WON'T single out PRC because PRC has the most adjacent/close maritime neighbours (entire 1st island chain drama) and smallest EEZ : land area ratio... absurdly disproportionately smaller. Something like 0.1 EEZ per unit of land area. Most big countries with shore access has like 0.5-1.0, US 1.2, SKR 3, Japan lol 12. JP/SKR eats ~60kg of fish per capita, PRC "only" 40kg, which is higher than global average 20kg. But consider 60% / 850m Chinese live about as close to shore as the most inland Japanese/Korean (150km from shore), and they're not going to settle for system that grants them less fish per capita as they get wealthier. Ultimately, that's the geopolitics of it, people who like fish aren't going accept eating less fish than other people who like fish. Probably only fair system I can think of is to limit per capita DWF catch to small % of total fishery/seafood output, i.e. 95% has to be domestic aquaculture (again, PRC already near 80%, others big DWF like 30-50%), but that's going to be biased against countries with less land/lakes etc. Or a per capita cap. Everything else is unworkable even if it means unsustainable extraction, like climate change. Or maybe CCP will take the L... but that will get domestically messy.

IMO wildcatch:aquaculture ratio most sensible/proper incentive for future. Napkin math is if PRC aquaculture goes 80%->95% from 60m to 70m aquaculture, and drops 66% of wild catch from 15m to 5m metric tons. But that also means JP/SKR/TW... basically eliminate their DWF industry by 75-90+%. You'll know US is serious about IUU, not not weaponizing it when US media screams at partners to hit those quotas... well after US ratifies UNCLOS. Regardless, half the world poorer than (3 billion people / 2 Chinas), the less poor they are, the more fish they'll want to eat, and we want to incentivize more aquaculture seafood considering fish has less feed conversion ratio, it's better people eat fish than check/pigs/cattle when they can afford meat. Obviously less/no meat better, but humans will meat.

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#86
I work directly in this field.

One massive problem with data collection on fishing, is that the world is absolutely littered with outright fake AIS data, where the vast majority are registered as Chinese vessels. Anyone can purchase a AIS transmitter, and spoof the data. Some areas are much more affected - especially out in the middle of the pacific ocean, and the Indian sea. Some areas there can have almost 100% spoofed AIS data. So a lot of work goes toward filtering these out.

When working on this kind of analysis, you have a bunch of data sources: AIS, VMS, LRIT, which are either land or satellite borne. Other than these, you have SAR, Optical, NRD (navigation radar detectors), and some other - but with these, you obviously need to have some classification and correlation system. AIS is by far the most common source, and it is also the one that is easiest to manipulate.

Vessels can simply turn off their AIS transponders, while out at sea. And it can easily be spoofed. But a lot of the garbage AIS data is really just that, random garbage. Just some random MMSI attached to a Chinese flag, and a completely random sailing pattern. These are relatively easy to filter out, but often times they share the MMSI with actual vessels - many which are indeed Chinese vessels.

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#87

FWIW, China also produces enormous (enormous) quantities of seafood from caged underwater oceanic farms. It's the future of fishing IMHO. The rich, everywhere in the world, will continue to seek wild-caught though. (While they publicly rail against the poor eating wild-caught. Such is how the wheels turn.).

Or we could just not eat fish, like I haven't done for all my 36 years of life?

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#88
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to stop destroying ocean ecosystems, not just shift the damage around. Overfishing of wild stock, habitat destruction through bottom-trawling and intensive fish farming all need to be properly looked at. You criticise, yet don't provide any suitable recommendations or alternatives. People like to eat fish and have done so since the beginning of our species.

The solution to overfishing, over consumption of fossil fuels, over consumption of beef etc is all the same in the current system. Impose appropriate taxes that adequately capture the impact of the negative externalities. Living in unsustainable ways is ... well not sustainable. If people have liked to eat fish since the start, then maybe we should leave some for the next generations.

Taxes isn't the right approach, in Brazil is taxes over taxes and the poor people is the real affected by them. They cannot eat fish frequently or only through processed food, which in turn, is mixed with many other things which are bad for their healthy too.

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to overfishing, over consumption of fossil fuels, over consumption of beef etc is all the same in the current system. Impose appropriate taxes that adequately capture the impact of the negative externalities. Living in unsustainable ways is ... well not sustainable. If people have liked to eat fish since the start, then maybe we should leave some for the next generations.

Taxes isn't the right approach, in Brazil is taxes over taxes and the poor people is the real affected by them. They cannot eat fish frequently or only through processed food, which in turn, is mixed with many other things which are bad for their healthy too.

That is the whole point. The taxes are there to reduce consumption, and the people who reduce their consumption first are the poor.

Re: China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

#90
post #18

FWIW, China also produces enormous (enormous) quantities of seafood from caged underwater oceanic farms. It's the future of fishing IMHO. The rich, everywhere in the world, will continue to seek wild-caught though. (While they publicly rail against the poor eating wild-caught. Such is how the wheels turn.).

Yes, but I suspect they way they feed these fish farms (desired, commercially viable fish) is by catching large portions of other fish (which explains how they account for 44%), processing it (grinding, drying to pellets etc) and then selling it to the farmers.

My past comments, based on quick dives into the topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40913385

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36118309

Search some of the keywords in those comments if you are interested in knowing more.

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