Fishing Murky Waters: China's Aquaculture Challenges Upstream and Downstream

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars presents a talk on China's aquaculture industry.

Speakers:
David Barboza, The New York Times
Teresa Ish (invited), Environmental Defense Fund
WANG Hanling, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

China has a 2,000-year history of cultivating fish, making it the first civilization to do so. In the 1980s, aquaculture became a major target of rural development. Of China's total seafood output, 64 percent comes from aquaculture, making it the only country in the world where aquaculture outstrips wild catch. Since 1978, China's aquaculture production has increased 490 percent, making it the largest producer of farmed seafood in the world, accounting for 57 percent of global output. Aquaculture-including a wide variety of freshwater and saltwater finfish, shellfish, crustaceans, and aquatic plants-is a vibrant industry in China. Local governments promote aquaculture as a poverty alleviating industry and have therefore subsidized production of lucrative species. China supplies 70 percent of the tilapia imports to the United States and is also its fourth largest supplier of shrimp. Due to the retention of pollution in the flesh of fish, food safety has become a major challenge for Chinese aquaculture. International concern about food safety has cost China's aquaculture dearly, as countries ban species they discover to be contaminated. In 2007, the industry was hit by a U.S. ban on 5 species of Chinese seafood. Chinese consumers also are increasingly concerned about the safety of the fish they eat due to water pollution, dangerous farming practices, and poor processing in the aquaculture industry. In terms of ecological impacts, the rapid development of China's aquaculture industry has seriously polluted rivers, lakes, and coastal waters and the increasing demand for fishmeal is driving stock depletion in the oceans.

At this CEF meeting, David Barboza will discuss some of the challenges facing Chinese fish farmers upstream in lakes, rivers, and fish ponds, while Wang Hanling will focus on the downstream issues of coastal pollution and over fishing that is endangering China's coastal fisheries. Another "downstream" issue Wang Hanling also will touch on is the China's government's efforts to protect fisheries and better track problems with aquaculture products. As one potential model for China in better enforcing standards for fish, Teresa Ish will introduce EDF's seafood work with U.S. corporations.