by Paulo | 23 octubre 2013 3:31 pm
“We can’t assess the state of the oceans without knowing what’s being taken out of them,”said Daniel Pauly, a fisheries scientist at the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who led the study.
The unreported catch is crippling the artisanal fisheries that help to feed West African populations.
Fisheries experts have long suspected that the catches reported by China to the Food
and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Rome are too low.
From 2000 to 2011, the country reported an average overseas catch of 368,000 tonnes a year. Yet China claims to have the world’s biggest distant water fishing fleet, implying a much larger haul, said the study, which was funded by the European Union (EU).
Pauly and his colleagues estimate that the average catch for 2000 to 2011 was in fact 4.6 million tonnes a year, more than 12 times the reported figure.
Of that total, 2.9 million tonnes a year came from West Africa, one of the world’s most
productive fishing grounds.
West African waters are deemed to have the highest levels of IUU fishing in the world, representing up to 37% of the region’s catch. Along with the economic losses, pirate fishing in West Africa severely compromises food security and the livelihoods of coastal communities, the health of fish stocks and the marine environment.
Fishing contracts between Chinese companies and African nations are secret, so to estimate the catch, Pauly and his team had to do some sleuthing.
The picture was further clouded because Chinese companies sometimes operate vessels flying local flags.
So at least ten researchers combined clues from field interviews, scholarly articles and
newspaper and online reports in 14 languages to estimate how many Chinese fishing vessels were operating in 93 countries and territories. They found many in nations where China reported no catch.
The estimates were averaged to reach their conclusion: China had at least 900 ocean-going vessels, with 345 in West Africa, including 256 bottom-trawlers.
The scientists estimated the catch per country on the basis of an assumed average catch for each type of vessel. “These numbers may not be absolutely exact, but they give the first hint of the magnitude of the problem,” said Boris Worm, a marine ecologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, who was not involved in the study.
Other experts are skeptical. “The new estimates seem far, far too high,” said Richard Grainger, chief of the fisheries statistics and information service at the FAO. He noted that a previous assessment estimated the total unreported catch in West Africa (by all nations) at 300,000–560,000 tonnes a year.
That study tried to identify what was missing from official catch figures with a review of English language scientific studies.
If the new numbers stand up, renewals of fishing contracts with West African nations
could be affected. In the 2000s, under public pressure, EU fleets stopped fishing in
coastal waters off much of West Africa, except Mauritania and Morocco. They were replaced by Chinese vessels, mostly large bottom-trawlers whose violations of near-shore no-fishing zones have led to protests.
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