Thus, there are no publicly accessible databases of access agreements between China (or Chinese companies) and the countries in which Exclusive Economic Zones' (EEZs) Chinese fishing vessels operate. Unfortunately, what did not improve in the transition to the 21st century – occasionally seen as the start of an age of transparency (Sifry 2011) – is the tendency towards secrecy in fisheries data and the near complete disregard for public accountability of the use of public resources (Mallory 2013). In other words, Chinese distant-water fisheries have become globally important economic actors. 2008), Latin America (Ferchen 2012) and Oceania (Wesley-Smith 2007). These are remarkable achievements in technology, logistics and business, mirroring other sectors of the Chinese economic expansion into the rest of Asia (Gaulier et al. Also, China began to supply local infrastructure including wharves and port facilities. Thus, initially, China simply ‘exported’ its coastal fleet, mainly consisting of bottom trawlers, to the waters of foreign countries it could operate in (Pang and Pauly 2001).Īt the onset of the 21st century, however, Chinese distant-water fisheries had changed, with specialized ‘catcher’ vessels (bottom trawlers, but also purse seiners, squid jiggers, longliners, etc.) linked to mother ships delivering their catch to strategically located freezing and processing facilities, and supplying local, international and its own domestic markets (Mallory 2013, 2012). However, at first, China lacked the specialized vessels required for distant-water fishing and the infrastructure required for supplying such vessels. 1998).īy the end of the 20th century, the People's Republic of China (here referred to as ‘China’, and excluding Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau) had also become a major distant-water fishing nation (Xue 2006 Mallory 2013, 2012). This was soon manifested in the development of dedicated distant-water fleets and fisheries, first by the United Kingdom and other European countries and the USA, later joined by the former Soviet Union, and by Japan and South Korea (Bonfil et al. This decline, which appeared earlier in regions of the world where fisheries where first industrialized, for example in north-western Europe, triggered a generalized expansion of industrial fisheries (Swartz et al. The world fisheries catch has been stagnating and probably declining since the late 1980s (FAO 2011), despite a strong increase in fishing effort, notably in Asia (Anticamara et al.

The uncertainty of these estimates is relatively high, but several sources of inaccuracy could not be fully resolved given the constraints inherent in the underlying data and method, which also prevented us from distinguishing between legal and illegal catch. year −1 reported by China to FAO), corresponds to an ex-vessel landed value of 8.93 billion € year −1 (95% central distribution, 6.3–12.3 billion).

This catch, estimated at 4.6 million t year −1 (95% central distribution, 3.4–6.1 million t year −1) from 2000 to 2011 (compared with an average of 368 000 t We find that China, which over-reports its domestic catch, substantially under-reports the catch of its distant-water fleets.

Given the unreliability of official statistics, uncertainty of results was estimated through a regionally stratified Monte Carlo approach, which documents the presence and number of Chinese vessels in Exclusive Economic Zones and then multiplies these by the expected annual catch per vessel. We conservatively estimate the distant-water fleet catch of the People's Republic of China for 2000–2011, using a newly assembled database of reported occurrence of Chinese fishing vessels in various parts of the world and information on the annual catch by vessel type.

Ex vessel meaning