When his vessel is still far out to sea, the captain uses a mobile phone app to notify the port of his arrival. He specifies what time he’ll get in, and submits catch data that the port managers will later check.
This is how it works off Taizhou, on China’s eastern coast, where trials of a system designating the ports at which domestic fishing vessels can land their catches have been running since 2018. A traceability trial has also been running in parallel: each crate of fish is barcoded so it can be tracked from when it was caught to the port and then on to market. By scanning the code with a mobile phone, anyone along the supply chain can see this information as well as where the fish were caught and by which boat.
The Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) announced a first batch of 66 designated ports last year. The plan is to have enough ports approved by the end of 2021 to accommodate all fishing vessels of 12 metres or more in length. At which point, the MOA may ban the landing of catches elsewhere. Although China has more than twice as many vessels shorter than 12 metres, the longer group has almost seven times the total horsepower and accounts for the bulk of Chinese coastal fishing capacity.
The designated port scheme is part of overall reforms to the management of ports and fishing vessels in China. While previous oversight focused on vessels at sea, the new reforms aim to allow sustainable fisheries management, with better reporting of when vessels enter and leave, and various checks, including of landed catches, catch quantity, legal compliance and vessel safety management. These will all be handled at the port, where fishing sector workers, vessels and catches come together.
Why designate ports?
“The designated ports are a very important starting point for our reforms, and will solve issues with checking data on catches landed,” Tang Yi, a professor at Shanghai Ocean University, told China Dialogue Ocean.
Currently, China’s catch statistics are reported upwards through various levels of fisheries authorities, and discrepancies can be quite large. But as the ports are a bottleneck through which all fish must pass as they move from sea to table, the designation system should allow landed weight information to be reported accurately and properly checked.
This data matters for sustainable fisheries management. The fishing quota system included in the version of China’s Fisheries Law that was revised in 2000 has never been implemented due to problems with data, oversight of the fish trade and technology.
Without monitoring catches on their arrival in port and transfer to market, fish are landed and sold freely. That has allowed over-fishing, reducing the effect of both controls on fishing capacity and stricter closed seasons.
Limits on vessel numbers and horsepower date back to the late 1980s and have featured in a number of China’s five-year plans for economic development. But data from 2003 to 2014 show that while vessel numbers fell, overall horsepower rose. Experts put that failure down to a lack of enforcement. There was, for example, nothing to stop a large vessel registering as a smaller one. The first closed seasons started in 1995 and they were lengthened in 2017, but while these protected fish during spawning, they did nothing to curb over-fishing at other times.
Since 1995, China’s annual coastal fishing catch has always been over 10 million tonnes. In 2016, it reached 13.28 million, far above the level recommended by experts. The fish caught are becoming younger and smaller as a result of this overfishing.
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Designated ports could pave way for sustainable fishing in Chinese waters - chinadialogue ocean
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