China "Vastly Underreporting" Global Fish Catch Even As Farmed Biomass Surpasses Wild

China is massively under-reporting the catch of its distant-waters fishing fleet, according to a little-noticed 2012 report to the European Parliament.

The catch was reported to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as averaging 368,000 tonnes of fish from distant-water fleets per year over the past decade. It was actually more than 12 times as big, at 4.6 million tonnes, according to the 102-page report, titled The Role of China in World Fisheries.

The study focuses on marine capture fisheries (excluding aquaculture and inland fisheries) and deals with mainland China. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are excluded. It is based on a specifically assembled, large international database of reported occurrences of Chinese vessels in various parts of the world, and related information, the authors say.

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China began developing its distant-water fleet fairly recently, in 1985, but the fleet has now expanded to 1,900 distant vessels in 2010. During the period from 2000 to 2010 an average of 1,800 of them operated in waters far from China's shores. The distant-water sector appears to depend heavily on subsidies to survive, the report continues, and despite having evolved from being entirely state-owned to being 70 privatized, "it is the stated goal of the government to modernize and expand (and restructure) the sector. A third of the industry is composed of the state-owned enterprise, Chinese National Fisheries Corporation, and its subsidiaries.

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http://asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5347&Itemid=422